"Belle, we'll have to get out of here."
"Out of—how do you mean?"
"Our lease is up in May. We'd have to go then, anyway. But I was talking to a fellow to-day—Leach, of the David, Anderson company. They've made a pile in war contracts. His wife's looking for an apartment about this size and neighborhood. They'd take it off our hands—the lease I mean."
"Now? You mean now!"
"Yes. We could take something smaller. We—we'll have to, Belle."
She threw a terrified glance around the room. It was a glance that encompassed everything, as though she were seeing it all for the first time. It was the look one gives a cherished thing that is about to be snatched away. A luxurious room with its silken bed-covers and rosy hangings. The room of a fastidious luxury-loving woman. Its appointments were as carefully chosen as her gowns. The beds were rich dark walnut, magnificently marked—not at all the walnut of Mrs. Payson's great cumbersome edifice in the old Prairie Avenue house—but exquisite pieces of bijouterie; plump, inviting; beds such as queens have slept in. The reading lamp on the small table between gave just the soothing subdued glow to make one's eleven o'clock printed page a narcotic instead of a stimulant. Beside it a little clock of finest French enamel picked out with platinum ticked almost soundlessly.
Terror lay in her eyes as they turned from their contemplation of this to the man who stood before her. "Oh, Henry, can't we hold out just for awhile? This war can't last much longer. Everybody says it'll be over soon—the spring, perhaps—" She who had just spoken to Charley of its endlessness.
"It's no use, Belle. No one knows how long it'll last. I hate to give it up. But we've got to, that's all. We might as well face it."
"How about Ben Gartz? He promised to take you into the business—that wonderful business."
"He didn't promise. He sort of hinted. He didn't mean any harm. He's a big talker, Ben."