"Because—just because," I answered.
"I know, she is moving into another world now. I am glad she is taking Eulalie with her. But she can never forget you, Dave. You will always be the best and dearest of friends to her. You must go and see her often."
"I'm afraid it will never be quite the same, Frieda. She will have a little parlor now, and it won't be like the room she trusted me to enter, the place where Baby Paul first saw the light, the dingy quarters in which her new voice was born. Oh! Frieda! Have we ever fully realized how patient she was, how resigned? We surely never did because we could not know how great her loss had been. We merely had an idea that she had been deprived of a few golden notes, and all the time she knew that she had lost a treasure beyond compare. And yet how brave she was through it all! With what courage she went to work in that poor little shop to gain the pittance that might keep her and Baby Paul farther from want! We have never once heard her whimper, nor has she ever seemed really discouraged. Sometimes she showed great sadness, of course, but it was born of her misfortune and of her fears for the little one, because of the love for him that surged in her heart. God! Frieda, but you women are brave and strong!"
"Yes, David dear, especially when we find a good man to lean upon," she answered.
And so, as I have said, Frances went away to a very decent little apartment Frieda found for her, and Eulalie was installed in a kitchen of her own, and the latchstring was always out for us. I enjoyed some pleasant days of tacking a few photos on the walls and hanging portières. Some of the time I had to work alone, for she was much taken up. Three weeks after the concert she went away on a tour, having joined forces with Tsheretshewski, the great cellist, an obese and long haired artist with a wife and seven children, who became a thing of poetry and beauty when he played. I heard them in Carnegie Hall, and then they went off on a tour that took them as far as Chicago and St. Louis, and my agency for newspaper cuttings kept on sending me articles by real or alleged critics. Eulalie traveled with her, and the baby also went from town to town. Frances sent me many postals and, often, letters. The latter always began with "Dearest Dave."
Then came the spring again and a meeting that was positively dreadful, during which Frances pulled out little rags of paper full of her scribbling and covered over with numbers which represented her indebtedness to me. We fought like cats and dogs over the items, till, finally, she proudly pulled out a checkbook from a little desk and wrote out the amount, signing the thing boldly and declaring that she would never speak to me again unless I took it.
"You see, David dear," she explained, "everything is all right now and I am making lots of money, and you can't refuse, because you know I only accepted in the hope that I would be able to pay it all back some day, and it will leave me a debtor to you for a million things, and Baby Paul too!"
During the summer she went to Newport, where Richetti gave another concert and where he made her a flattering offer to help in his teaching of the infinitely rich and sometimes voiceless. Thank goodness that a press of work came to me, for Ceballo, the great manager, actually sought me out and insisted on collaborating with me in a dramatization of "Land o' Love," which had passed its second hundred thousand. He nearly drove me to insanity, while we toiled at it, and I would have cried mercy before the end, but for the furious energy with which he kept me a prisoner of his wiles.
Then I spent a few weeks in the Adirondacks, having found a small hotel where people never put on war-paint for dinner and no one was ashamed to wear flannel shirts, and I rowed and pretended to fish and lost myself in the woods to my heart's content, finally returning to my old typewriter with a mass of notes for a further novel. I took up once more my lonely vigils, when I could, because I began to feel the grasp of many cogwheels that were the penalty of success. Some magazines actually requested stories of me.
About the first of October I received a cablegram from Gordon, which appalled me with its suddenness.