But to all these suggestions Archie was able gratefully to explain that his wife had already arranged matters. For as soon as she collected her numbed faculties, she had telegraphed to Stefan Nikolai, and he had replied within the hour: "Draw on me to any amount." "There," she remarked to the weeping Ellen. "That's the Jewness coming out in him, just as you said it would!..." Ellen did all the weeping that was done in the Blair household during this crisis. The shock seemed to have quite broken her, so that it was the mistress who had to comfort the servant. "I'd ought to have known," she wailed, "with him lookin' so peakid and all! But I thought it was--something else. Oh, why couldn't he have _told_ me? I could have kep' the bills down more, had pot-roasts instead of fancy-cuts, and hearts--you know how tasty beef-hearts can be, Joan, when I set my mind to 'em! 'T aint as if I wasn't an old hand at makin' things do. But you always had such rich ways, just like your father. And I let it fool me.... Oh, the poor boy, the poor, scairt, lonesome boy, tryin' to go ahead all by himself!" Joan's heart ached for her husband, too, as much as a heart can ache that seems turned into stone. She felt physically numb all over, except in her brain, and that worked mercilessly as ever--merciless not only to him but to herself. She did not hesitate to put the blame where much of it belonged. "I have been utterly selfish, one of the vampires that sap a man's strength, his ability, his very decency, and give nothing in return. Yet--does any one but a fool yield to vampires?" She tried to make for him every excuse he had not made for himself. "It was all for me, to give me what he thought I wanted, the things my friends have. He could not bear to deprive me of anything." Yet he had deprived her of the thing she valued most in life: her pride. He had committed the sin unpardonable. He had, as the English put it, "let her down." She, Joan Darcy, in whom pride was the dominant trait, pride of race, of intellect, of character--she was the wife of a defaulter, a common thief! Despite people's marked kindness and consideration toward her, she fancied she knew what they were saying: "An extravagant wife. A woman who neglected her home and her husband." But of the charge of extravagance at least she was able to acquit herself. The iron of poverty had entered too early and too deep into her soul for that. She knew that dressing, for instance, cost her far less than it cost any woman of her acquaintance. She had always made taste and skill take the place of money there, and in other ways. Much that was unusual in her little house she had done herself, staining walls, painting woodwork, covering furniture. Where her neighbors employed several servants, she did very well with one; and if she left much of her household management in Ellen's hands, it was because she knew them to be more experienced than her own.