“I haven’t said I’d take it—­positively.”

“Naturally.  Of course you haven’t.”

He dabbled the spoon uneasily in his tea, looking downcast.  “I don’t quite see that,” he objected, trying to rally his pluck, “why it should be—­naturally.”

“Oh, don’t you?  To me it’s self-evident.  We may have lost money, but we’re still not—­recipients of alms.”

“This wasn’t alms.  It was four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

She was plainly awe-struck.  “That’s a great deal; but I supposed it would be something large.  And yet the magnitude of the sum only makes it the more impossible to accept.”

“Y-es; of course—­if you look at it in that way.”  He put back his cup on the table untasted.

“Surely it’s the only way to look at it?  Aren’t you going to drink your tea?”

“No, I think not.  I’ve had enough.  I’ve—­I’ve had enough—­of everything.”

He sank back wearily into the depths of his arm-chair.  The glitter had passed from his eyes; he looked ill.  He had clearly not enough courage to make a stand for what he wanted.  She could see how cruelly he was disappointed.  After all, he might have accepted the money and told her nothing about it!  He had taken her into his confidence because of that need of expansion that had often led him to “give away” what a more crafty man would have kept to himself.  She was profiting by his indiscretion to make what was already so hard for him still harder.  Sipping her tea slowly, she turned the subject over and over in her mind, seeking some ground on which to agree with him.

She did this the more conscientiously, since she had often reproached herself with a fixity of principle that might with some show of reason be called too inflexible.  Between right and wrong other people, especially the people of her “world,” were able to see an infinitude of shadings she had never been able to distinguish.  She half accepted the criticism often made of her in Paris and London that her Puritan inheritance had given an inartistic rigidity to her moral prospect.  It inclined her to see the paths of life as ruled and numbered like the checker-board plan of an American city, instead of twisting and winding, quaintly and picturesquely, with round-about evasions and astonishing short-cuts, amusing to explore, whether for the finding or the losing of the way, as in any of the capitals long trodden by the feet of men.  Between the straight, broad avenues of conduct, well lighted and well defined, there lay apparently whole regions of byways, in which those who could not easily do right could wander vaguely, without precisely doing wrong, following a line that might be termed permissible.  Into this tortuous maze her spirit now tried to penetrate, as occasionally, to visit some historic monument, she had plunged into the slums of a medieval town.

It was an exercise that brought her nothing but a feeling of bewilderment.  Having no sense of locality for this kind of labyrinth, she could only turn round and round confusedly.  All she could do, when from the drooping of her father’s lids she feared he was falling off to sleep, leaving the question unsettled, was to say, helplessly: