His Second Wife

By the next day she had made up her mind to look for another apartment. The move had several points in its favour. It would not only take her away from this place where she felt...

Her first month in town was a season of shopping and of warm anticipations--and then came a sudden crash. Afterward it was hard to remember. For tragedy entered into these rooms...

She slept that night exhausted, woke up early the next morning and lay motionless on her bed: at first staring bewildered about the room, and then, with a sharp contraction of h...

About this time a letter from home brought her a sharp disappointment. Ethel was not a good correspondent, but during the homesick winter months she had written several times to...

The week after Ethel's return to town, she was surprised one afternoon when in response to a note she had sent him her husband's partner came to see her. She had thought it woul...

The days dragged by. She had anxious times. What would Sally Crothers be like? "And what in the world will she think of me? If she doesn't like me--very much--the very first tim...

Ethel had been about four weeks in town, and now she was to meet Amy's friends. Amy was giving a dinner the next evening in her honour; and to let the cook and the waitress have...

The next morning at eleven o'clock she met Dwight in his studio, and in a brisk pleasant businesslike way she began to tell him of her voice--what singing she had done at home a...

As she sat there she grew furious with herself for having bungled so. Why hadn't she explained to him? Why hadn't she simply told him her plan for giving him back his friends? A...

One evening about two months later Ethel was dressing for dinner. As usual they were dining alone, but long ago she had taken the habit of dressing each night as though there we...

She did not see Mrs. Grewe again, she did not want to see her. It was not until from the telephone girl she learned that the charming young widow was gone, that Ethel went up to...

But all this was as nothing compared to the intensity, the ups and down, in her relations with Joe himself. He often looked tired and harassed. "What's the matter with me?" he s...

But she did not tell him all, that night. She did not say, "One of Amy's friends was here today, and she's coming again, and more are coming--and I hate them, every one!" She si...

The next afternoon she sat waiting for Joe. She had come home the night before feeling so strong and sure of her course. But beginning at the moment when she came into the empty...

For a time she had seen little of Joe. She had been absorbed in her new work; and Joe, in his business troubles. But as he began to see light ahead, again he took notice of thin...

What impression had she made? How far had she overcome the heavy weight of dislike and suspicion Amy had rolled up in his mind? As Ethel's thoughts went rapidly back over the th...

On a train speeding toward New York, in one of the parlour cars two young women sat facing each other, talking and smiling, deeply absorbed. They took little apparent notice of...

Joe did not say, "I told you so." It was after eight that evening when he came home from his office, and she was annoyed at the delay, for she wanted to have her confession of f...

Mrs. Crothers lived in a small brick house on a side street close to Washington Square. As Ethel looked out from her automobile, how dear and homey it appeared, with such a quie...

What deep relief and blessed peace. She lay on her bed, now smiling, now inert, eyes closed, weak and relaxed, but already aware from time to time of the beginnings within herse...

She got him to bed. The specialist came, and when he had examined Joe he had a talk with Ethel that left her very frightened. After that came days and nights, when Joe, as, thou...

"Well, Ethel my love, we're here at last! . . . It must be after midnight. I wonder when I'll get to sleep? . . . Not that I care especially. What a quaint habit sleeping is."

"How have things been going?" she asked. "Very well indeed," said Ethel, with a scarcely perceptible smile. She and Emily understood each other, though very little had ever been...

On the night before they sailed for France, long after she had gone to bed Ethel came out in her wrapper into the warm dark living-room. There was something she had forgotten to...

They were married early in December. There were no preparations to be made, for a wedding is nothing without friends, and they had none but Amy's and though Joe said nothing to...

In reply to her note, Dwight had telephoned that Sally would be there at five. Mrs. Crothers arrived at a quarter past. She was a small alert looking woman of thirty-five, slend...

"Now the one thing," she told herself, "is to keep your nerve and be sensible. For this may decide your whole life, you know. . . All right, what next? What's to be done?

It was a few weeks later. A doctor had been there and gone, and returning into the living-room Ethel sank down on a chair with a quiet intensity in her eyes. For some time she h...