“When a family once gets talked about for any reason——­” said Ina and shuddered.

“I’m talked about now!”

“But nothing that you could help.  If he got tired of you, you couldn’t help that.”  This misstep was Dwight’s.

“No,” Lulu said, “I couldn’t help that.  And I couldn’t help his other wife, either.”

“Bigamy,” said Dwight, “that’s a crime.”

“I’ve done no crime,” said Lulu.

“Bigamy,” said Dwight, “disgraces everybody it touches.”

“Even Di,” Lulu said.

“Lulu,” said Dwight, “on Di’s account will you promise us to let this thing rest with us three?”

“I s’pose so,” said Lulu quietly.

“You will?”

“I s’pose so.”

Ina sobbed:  “Thank you, thank you, Lulu.  This makes up for everything.”

Lulu was thinking:  “Di has a hard enough time as it is.”  Aloud she said:  “I told Mr. Cornish, but he won’t tell.”

“I’ll see to that,” Dwight graciously offered.

“Goodness,” Ina said, “so he knows.  Well, that settles——­” She said no more.

“You’ll be happy to think you’ve done this for us, Lulu,” said Dwight.

“I s’pose so,” said Lulu.

Ina, pink from her little gust of sobbing, went to her, kissed her, her trim tan tailor suit against Lulu’s blue cotton.

“My sweet, self-sacrificing sister,” she murmured.

“Oh stop that!” Lulu said.

Dwight took her hand, lying limply in his.  “I can now,” he said, “overlook the matter of the letter.”

Lulu drew back.  She put her hair behind her ears, swallowed, and cried out.

“Don’t you go around pitying me!  I’ll have you know I’m glad the whole thing happened!”

* * * * *

Cornish had ordered six new copies of a popular song.  He knew that it was popular because it was called so in a Chicago paper.  When the six copies arrived with a danseuse on the covers he read the “words,” looked wistfully at the symbols which shut him out, and felt well pleased.

“Got up quite attractive,” he thought, and fastened the six copies in the window of his music store.

It was not yet nine o’clock of a vivid morning.  Cornish had his floor and sidewalk sprinkled, his red and blue plush piano spreads dusted.  He sat at a folding table well back in the store, and opened a law book.

For half an hour he read.  Then he found himself looking off the page, stabbed by a reflection which always stabbed him anew:  Was he really getting anywhere with his law?  And where did he really hope to get?  Of late when he awoke at night this question had stood by the cot, waiting.

The cot had appeared there in the back of the music-store, behind a dark sateen curtain with too few rings on the wire.  How little else was in there, nobody knew.  But those passing in the late evening saw the blur of his kerosene lamp behind that curtain and were smitten by a realistic illusion of personal loneliness.