But Elise was not ready to let Jimmie live. To her, Jimmie the artist was
more than Jimmie the lover. I may have been unjust, but she seemed to me
a sort of mental vampire, who was sucking Jimmie's youth. Duncan Street
snorted when I told him what I thought. Elise was a pretty woman, and a
pretty woman in the eyes of men can do no wrong.

"You'll see," I said, "what she'll do to him."

The situation was to me astounding. Here was Life holding out its hands
to Elise, glory of youth demanding glorious response, and she,
incredibly, holding back. In spite of my gray hair and stiff figure, I
am of the galloping kind, and my soul followed Jimmie Harding's in its
quest for freedom.

But there was one thing that Elise could not do. She could not make
Jimmie rewrite his play. "I'll come to it some day," he said, "but not
yet. In the meantime I'll see what I can do with books."

He did a great deal with books, so that he wrote several best-sellers.
This eased the financial situation and they might have had more time for
things. But Elise still kept him at it. She wanted to be the wife of a
great man.

Yet as the years went on, Duncan and I began to wonder if her hopes
would be realized. Jimmie wrote and wrote. He was successful in a
commercial sense, but fame did not come to him. There was gray in his
burnt-gold hair; his shoulders acquired a scholarly droop, and he wore
glasses on a black ribbon. It was when he put on glasses that I began to
feel a thousand years old. Yet always when he was away from me I thought