And yet how curious, even here.  For whenever Ethel endeavoured to get the conversation upon a little more intimate terms, Mrs. Grewe would almost instantly become evasive and remote.  And once when Ethel asked her to “drop down and have dinner with us some night,” she declined almost with a start, as though she were saying, “Ha!  Look out!  I’m in danger of letting you be a real friend!” And thinking this over, Ethel reflected, “The only New Yorker I’ve met so far, whom I’d like to know, is nice to me simply because she is going abroad in a month and so it’s safe!  Has she offered to introduce me to a single friend of hers?  Well, then, don’t!  Keep your old friends!  I don’t want to eat them!” And for days together she would leave the young widow alone.

But the latter would make pleasant advances, and soon they would be shopping again.  This acquaintance was one of the few bright spots in a season which for Ethel was full of anxious worries.  For it was by no means easy.  Amy had been a shopper who simply could not resist pretty things, and so her apartment was crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac.  “How much can I get rid of without offending Joe?” asked Ethel.  He was the kind of man who says nothing.  He would not object, but he would feel hurt.  It took the most careful probing to find how far she could safely go.  And she was tempted by the shops.  In her smart town car, with plenty of money and with young Mrs. Grewe at her side, it was almost impossible to resist the adorable things she discovered.  “No wonder Amy bought too much.”  But there they were, all Amy’s belongings, and to be rid of each table, each chair, each rug, meant the most careful thinking.

“Nevertheless,” she told herself.  “That apartment upstairs is to be my own home.”

In the meantime her new occupation was working out wonderfully as an excuse for not going about in the evenings.  She was so dead tired every night.  No need to feign fatigue, it was real.  She even had to call in her physician, in the first “draggy” days of Spring; and he warned her that she was doing too much, it was too soon after the birth of her child.  She was glad when Joe happened to come in and overhear the doctor.  He became the same old dear to her that he had I been a year ago.  And with eagerness, tired though she was, she took pains every evening to dress in ways that she knew he liked.  And at times it was almost like a second honeymoon they were having.  She used the baby, too, and Susette; she often persuaded Joe to come home in time for Susette’s supper, or better still for the baby’s bath.  And all this was so successful that even when her spring fever was gone she still stayed at home in the evenings.