He frowned resentfully, and she immediately regretted her words.  By speaking the truth she had defeated her purpose.

“It isn’t as if I were buying a horse for pleasure,” he answered doggedly; “I am dependent on exercise—­you can see for yourself how I’ve gone off in the last two or three months.  Of course if the horse were simply for enjoyment, like a carriage, it would be different.  But mother has given up her carriage,” he concluded triumphantly.

He was a spendthrift, she realized, but he was a spendthrift with a streak of stinginess in his nature.  Though he enjoyed gratifying his own desires, which were many, it pained him inexpressibly to witness extravagance on the part of others, and by a curious twist of the imagination, all money spent by Gabriella appeared to him to be an extravagance.  To be sure, he had just told her that she was a brick about money, but that had been intended as a warning to virtue rather than as an encouragement to weakness.  There was, to be sure, a vague understanding that she might make bills when they were unavoidable; but so in want of spending money had she been since her marriage, that several times she had been obliged to borrow car fare from her mother-in-law.  When she had asked George for an allowance, however small, he had put her off with the permission to charge whatever she bought in the shops.  As the bills apparently never lessened, and her conscience revolted from debt, she had gone without things she needed rather than accept the barren generosity of his promises.  At Christmas her father-in-law had given her fifty dollars in gold, and with this she had bought presents for her mother and Jane and the servants.

In the old days in Hill Street she had had little enough, but at least that little had really belonged to her; and since her marriage she had learned that when one is poor, it is better to live surrounded by want.  To be poor in the midst of wealth—­to be obliged to support a fictitious affluence on one’s secret poverty—­this was after all to know the supreme mortification of spirit.  There were days when she almost prayed that the brooding suspense would assume a definite shape, that the blow would fall, the crash come, and ruin envelop them all.  Any visible fact would be better than this impending horror of the imagination—­this silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure—­which encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of a cloud.

“Then I can’t help my mother even if it’s a matter of life and death?” she asked.

“I don’t believe it’s as bad as that, Gabriella.  Ten chances to one the rest of the winter will be mild, and she would find Florida too depressing.  You never can tell about doctors, you know.  It’s their business to make trouble.  Now you mustn’t let yourself worry—­there’s anxiety enough without that, heaven knows.  Why, just look at father!  He has lost almost all he ever had—­he is simply staving off failure for I don’t know how long, and yet from mother’s manner who on earth would suspect that there is anything wrong?  Now that’s what I call pluck.  By Jove—­”