Joe Lanier was what is called "a speculative builder." He was an
architect, building contractor and real estate gambler, all in one. He
put up apartment buildings "on spec," buildings of the cheaper sort,
most of them up in the Bronx, and sold them at a profit--or a loss, as
the case might be. He dealt in the rapidly shifting values of
neighbourhoods in the changing town. "The gamble in it is the fun," he
remarked to Ethel one evening. Joe was just the kind of a man, as Amy
had told her sister, to make a big sudden success of his work.
Unfortunately he was tied to a partner, Nourse by name, who held him
back. This man Amy keenly disliked. She said that Nourse was a perfect
grind, a heavy tiresome creature who thought business was everything in
the world.

"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