One morning near the end of the month, when he was lower in his spirits than usual from this cause, there came a letter from the editor of the Boston _Abstract_ asking him if he could not write a weekly letter from New York for his old newspaper. It was a temptation, and Maxwell found it a hardship that his wife should have gone out just then to do the marketing for the day; she considered this the duty of a wife, and she fulfilled it often enough to keep her sense of it alive, but she much preferred to forage with him in the afternoon; that was poetry, she said, and the other was prose. He would have liked to talk the proposition over with her; to realize the compliment while it was fresh, to grumble at it a little, and to be supported in his notion that it would be bad business just then for him to undertake a task that might draw him away from his play too much; to do the latter well would take a great deal of time. Yet he did not feel quite that he ought to refuse it, in view of the uncertainties of the future, and it might even be useful to hold the position aside from the money it would bring him; the New York correspondent of the Boston _Abstract_ might have a claim upon the attention of the managers which a wholly unaccredited playwright could not urge; there was no question of their favor with Maxwell; he would disdain to have that, even if he could get it, except by the excellence, or at least the availability of his work. Louise did not come in until much later than usual, and then she came in looking very excited. "Well, my dear," she began to call out to him as soon as the door was opened for her, "I have seen that woman again!" "What woman?" he asked. "You know. That smouldering-eyed thing in the bathing-dress." She added, in answer to his stupefied gaze: "I don't mean that she was in the bathing-dress still, but her eyes were smouldering away just as they were that day on the beach at Magnolia." "Oh!" said Maxwell, indifferently. "Where did you see her?" "On the avenue, and I know she lives in the neighborhood somewhere, because she was shopping here on the avenue, and I could have easily followed her home if she had not taken the Elevated for down town." "Why didn't you take it, too? It might have been a long way round, but it would have been certain. I've been wanting you here badly. Just tell me what you think of that." He gave her the editor's letter, and she hastily ran it through. "I wouldn't think of it for a moment," she said. "Were there any letters for me?" "It isn't a thing to be dismissed without reflection," he began. "I thought you wanted to devote yourself entirely to the drama?" "Of course." "And you've always said there was nothing so killing to creative work as any sort of journalism." "This wouldn't take more than a day or two each week, and twenty-five dollars a letter would be convenient while we are waiting for our cards to turn up."