Eleanor said things like this many times a day. Straws! Straws! And they showed the way the wind was blowing. Sometimes, in the suffocating dust of fear that the wind raised she even forgot her purpose of making Maurice happy, in a violent urge to make it impossible for Edith Houghton to triumph over her. But the other thought--the crazy, nobler thought!--was, on the whole, dominant: "Maurice would be happy if he had a child. I couldn't give him a child of my own, but I can give him Jacky." Yet once in a while she balanced the advantages and disadvantages of the one way in which Jacky could be given: _Lily_? Could Maurice endure Lily? She thought of that parlor, of Lily's vulgarity, of the raucous note in her voice when those flashes of anger pierced like claws through the furry softness of her good nature; she thought of the reek of scent on the handkerchief. Could he endure Lily? Yet she was efficient; she would make him comfortable. "I never made him comfortable," she thought. "And he doesn't love her; so I wouldn't so terribly mind her being here--any more than I'd mind a housekeeper. But I wouldn't want her to call him 'Maurice.' I think I'll put that into my letter to him. I'll say that I will ask, as a last favor, that he will not let her call him 'Maurice.'" For by this time she had added another straw to the pile of rubbish in her mind: _she would write him a letter_. In it she would tell him that she was going to ... die, so that he could marry Lily and have Jacky! Then came the mental postscript, which would not, of course, be written; she would make it possible for him to marry Lily--_and impossible for him to marry Edith_! And by and by she got so close to her mean and noble purpose--a gift in one dead hand and a sword in the other!--that she began to think of ways and means. How could she die? She couldn't buy morphine without a prescription, and she couldn't possibly get a prescription. But there were other things that people did,--dreadful things! She knew she couldn't do anything "dreadful." Maurice had a revolver in his bureau drawer, upstairs--but she didn't know how to make it "go off"; and if she had known, she couldn't do it; it would be "dreadful." Well; a rope? No! Horrible! She had once seen a picture ... she shuddered at the memory of that picture. _That_ was impossible! Sometimes any way--every way!--seemed impossible. Once, wandering aimlessly about the thawing back yard, she stood for a long time at the iron gate, staring at the glimmer, a block away, of the river--"our river," Maurice used to call it. But in town, "their" river--flowing!--flowing! was filmed with oil, and washed against slimy piles, and carried a hideous flotsam of human rubbish; once down below the bridge she had seen a drowned cat slopping back and forth among orange skins and straw bottle covers. The river, in town, was as "dreadful" as those other impossible things! Back in the meadows it was