Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Oliver came back from St. Louis, and shortly--oh very shortly indeed by the way things looked--the only thing they would be able to talk about would be Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage were--and however glad Oliver might be for Ted and his luck--he really wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circumstances, for very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune--into a fortune that Oliver would have to be the last person on earth to grudge him--but that meant the end of eight years of fighting mockery and friendship together as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them down a well. They could pick it up later--after Ted had been married a year say--but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same. Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted might have thought when he and Nancy--But that wasn't comparable in the least. But Nancy and he were different. _Nancy_--and with that, the pain came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to bear it--and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was falling asleep.