So passed another fortnight. Then Joe grew quieter, and with relief she saw he was ready to stay home. She herself felt tired and relaxed; and it was good to sit at home on these December evenings and feel that both had partly emerged from the sea of doubts in which they had been plunged. He had come out of it, she soon learned, with an image of his wife that even Ethel vaguely felt was swiftly becoming so ideal as to have little or no resemblance to the woman who had died. But eagerly she helped him in this building of Amy's memory. She dwelt upon Amy's appealing side, her lovable moods, her beauty and dash, her unerring instinct for pretty things, her unselfishness, her anxious planning for Ethel's good.
And all this fitted in so well with the picture Joe was making of the wife who had been so true to him, who had never had a thought or a wish for anything but his career. How cheerfully she had given up all sorts of pleasures, trips abroad, a house in the country, summer vacations. Year after year she had spent the hot months almost wholly in town because he could not afford to leave, although she herself had had many chances to go to friends in the mountains or up along the seashore. Instead she had stayed with him in town; and in the evenings always she had been waiting, good-humoured and gay, ready to stay home or go out; with never a word of complaint for the delay of his prosperity, but only encouragement and praise.
At times, as Joe talked on and on, in this mood of hungry wistful love and humility and self-reproach, Ethel would bring herself back with a jerk to the Amy she had known; but again she would feel herself borne along upon the tide of his belief, and she was glad that it was so. So the picture grew. Nor was it only when they talked. For often in long silences, when she thought he was reading his paper, she would glance up from her book and find him staring into the past. And again at the piano, smoking and playing idly, his music made her realize how his mind was groping back through the years, picking and choosing here and there what he needed to build up his ideal.
This music at times made her curious, wondering what kind of a man he had been before Amy took him in hand.