It turned out just as she had expected. Nourse declined the invitation. "I'm sorry," she said when her husband told her. She felt her position strengthened a bit. At another time she suggested that Joe's partner be asked to spend the rest of the summer with him in the apartment back in town. It was doubtless so much cooler at night than Nourse's bachelor quarters. And Emily Giles could take care of them both. But this overture, too, Bill Nourse declined. She could just imagine him doing it, the surly, ungracious tone of his voice, the very worst side of the man shown up. Joe often now looked troubled when Ethel talked of his partner.
But toward the end of the summer in one such talk he gave her a shock. It was after Nourse had again refused an invitation to come to the seashore.
"He's queer," said Joe, "and he can be ugly. Being polite is not in
Bill's line. I told him so myself today—and we had quite a session.
"Oh, Joe, I'm sorry," Ethel said.
"You needn't be. Bill Nourse and I will stick together as long as we live." Ethel looked at him sharply, but he did not notice. "Because," he said, "with all his faults, his queerness and his grouches, Bill has done more than any man living to—well, to keep something alive in me—in my work, I mean—that I want later on—as soon as I've made money enough." She stared at him.
"You mean that he—your partner—wants something more than money?" It was a slip, but she was stunned. He turned and looked at her and asked, in a voice rather strained and husky:
"Do you think Bill cares about money alone?"
"Why, yes!"
"That's funny." But Joe's laugh was grim. "If Bill had had his way with me, I'd have had a name as an architect that would have been known all over the country—instead of being what I am, a gambler in cheap real estate."
She questioned him further, her manner alert, her eyes with a startled, thoughtful look. But he did not seem to want to talk.