“Do you mean to say that your income does not amount to so much?”

“My outgoes and incomes have for a long time been involved with each other.  I do not separate them.  I have never lived extravagantly.  My luxury has been in doing too much.”

A cold feeling came over me.

“By the way, Mr. Somers pays you compliments in his note.  How old are you?  I forget.”  He surveyed me with a doubtful look.  Are you thin, or what is it?”

“East wind, I guess.  I am twenty-five.”

“And Veronica?”

“Over twenty.”

“She must be married.  I hope she will cut her practical eye-teeth then, for Somers’s sake.”

“He does not require a practically minded woman.”

“What do men require!”

“They require the souls and bodies of women, without having the trouble of knowing the difference between the one and other.”

“So bad as that?  Whoa!”

He stopped to pay toll, and the conversation stopped.

On the way home, however, I found a place to begin my proposed talk, and burst out with, “I think Hepsey should leave us.”

“What ails Hepsey?”

“She is so old, and is such a poke.”

“You must tell her yourself to go.  She has money enough to be comfortable; I have some of it, as well as that of half the widows, old maids, and sailors’ wives in Surrey,’ being better than the Milford banks, they think.”

I felt another cold twinge.

“What! are our servants your creditors?”

“Servants—­don’t say that,” he said harshly; “we do not have these distinctions here.”

“It costs you more than two thousand a year.”

“How do you know?”

“Think of the hired people—­the horses, the cows, pigs, hens, garden, fields—­all costing more than they yield.”

“What has come over you?  Did you ever think of money before?  Tell me, have you ever been in our cellar?”

“Yes, to look at the kittens.”

“In the store-room?”

“For apples and sweetmeats.”

“Look into these matters, if you like; they never troubled your mother, at least I never knew that they did; but don’t make your reforms tiresome.”

What encouragement!

In the yard we saw Fanny contemplating a brood of hens, which were picking up corn before her.  “Take Fanny for a coadjutor; she is eighteen, and a bright girl.”  She sprang to the chaise, and caught the reins, which he threw into her hands, unbuckled the girth, and, before I was out of sight, was leading the horse to water.

“We might economize in the way of a stable-boy,” I said.

“Pooh! you are not indulgent.  Here,” whistling to Fanny, “let Sam do that.”  She pouted her lips at him, and he laughed.

Aunt Merce gave me a letter the moment I entered.  “It is in Alice’s hand; sit down and read it.”