“Oh, not at all,” she replied, and then added in a tone of more sincerity:  “I do have the most terrible time with my check-book.  And,” she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, “I was trying to balance it.”

“You should not be troubled with such things,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.

Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother’s checks, but of late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn.  “I don’t see how I can be,” she said, too hopeless to deny it.

“If you would allow me,” said Mr. Lanley.  “I am an excellent bookkeeper.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you,” said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.

“It hasn’t been balanced since—­dear me! not since October,” he said.

“I know; but I draw such small checks.”

“But you draw a good many.”

She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind her back.  Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor exercise.  She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he observed severely: 

“You really must be more careful about carrying forward.  Twice you have carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of—­”

“That’s always the way,” she interrupted.  “Whenever people look at my check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that there’s no time left for putting it right.”

“I won’t say another word,” returned Lanley; “only it would really help you—­”

“I don’t want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours,” she went on.  Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by merely lengthening the tail of a seven.  He said nothing more, but every time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went through her like a knife.

The task was a long one.  The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she lit the lamps before he finished.  At first he had tried not to be aware of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that his own decreased.

He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could not tolerate.  He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book, and rose to his feet.