"Sometimes I really believe he forgets it's for making money," Amy declared. "He's as anxious about it as an old hen, and he wants it steady as a cow. He detests me, as I do him. He has stopped coming here, thank heaven. And the time is not so far away when I'll make Joe see that he's got to lose his partner."
Joe's image gained steadily in importance to Ethel's awakening eyes. Of his force as a man, all that she saw made her more and more certain that Amy was right. Joe was the kind who was bound to succeed. He not only worked hard, his work was a passion. At night and on Sunday mornings he could sit for hours absorbed in the tiresome pages of real estate news in his paper. He went out for strolls in the evenings; one night he asked Ethel to come along; and his talk to her about buildings, the growth of the city by leaps and bounds, now in this direction, now in that, caught her imagination at once. Joe felt the town as a living thing, as she had felt it that first night. Different? Yes, this was business. But even business, to her surprise, as Joe saw and felt it, had a strange thrilling romance of its own.
And she soon noticed something else that drew her to Joe. Almost every evening he would sit down at his piano and start playing idly. As a rule he played dance music, popular songs from Broadway. But sometimes leaning back he would drift into other music. And though his hand would bungle and only sketch it, so to speak--in his black eyes, scowling slightly over the smoke of his cigar, would come a look which Ethel liked. But vaguely she felt that Amy did not, that it even made her uneasy. For almost invariably at such times, Amy would come behind him, her plump softly rounded arm would find its way down over his shoulder--and little by little the music would change and would come back to Broadway.
When Joe heard one evening that Ethel was "mad to learn to sing," he took her by the arm at once and marched her over to the piano. And they had quite a session together--till Amy suggested going out to a new cabaret she had heard of that day. Her voice sounded hurt and strained. And Ethel from that night on dropped all mention of singing.
Her curiosity deepened toward this city love affair, this husband and wife who apparently had left so many things out of their lives, things vital in the Ohio town. The sober wee girl in the nursery kept just as quiet as before. Often Ethel opened that door and went in and tried to make friends with its grave shy little inmate and the hostile nurse. And returning to her room she would frown and wonder for a time. But the pretty things piling in from the shops, and the gay anticipations, soon crowded such questioning out of her mind. Swiftly this household was growing more real, the rooms familiar, intimate; the day's routine with its small events were becoming parts of her life. Her own room was familiar now, for by many touches she'd made it her own. And the dining-room and the living room, where she grew acquainted with Joe, these too assumed an intimate air. Most of all, her sister's room grew more and more vivid in her thoughts, though this was still far from familiar, It held too much, it meant too much.