Then, after a thoughtful pause, she added with the practical air of one who scorns to be abstract:  “But do you know I sometimes think Archibald and I’d both be happier if we had never made any money at all—­I mean, of course, except just enough to live simply somewhere in the South.  When once you begin, you can’t stop, and I wish sometimes we had never begun.”  Above the narrow black velvet strings of her bonnet, her round florid face, from which the fine tracery of lines had vanished, assumed the intent and preoccupied expression which Gabriella associated with the pile of unpaid bills on the little French desk.  “I believe Archibald feels that way, too,” she concluded after a minute, while her firm and unemotional lips closed together over the words.

“But you enjoy it so much when you have it.”

“That’s just the trouble.  You have to enjoy it as quickly as you can because you never know when you are going to lose every bit of it without warning.  It’s been that way ever since I married—­rich one year, poor the next, or poor for two years and then rich for three.  Life has been a seesaw with prosperity at one end of the plank and poverty at the other.  Of course I know,” she pursued, with characteristic lucidity, “that you think me dreadfully extravagant, but we’d just as well spend it as lose it, and it’s sure to be one thing or the other.”

“But couldn’t you save something?  Couldn’t you put by something for the future?” Saving for the future was one of the habits of Gabriella’s frugal past which still clung to her.

“That would go, too.  If we ever come to ruin—­and heaven knows we’ve been on the brink of it before this—­Archibald would not keep back a penny.  That’s his way, and that’s one of the reasons I spend all we have—­up to the very margin of his income.”

The logic of this was so confusing that Gabriella was obliged to stop and puzzle it out.  At the end she could only admit that Mrs. Fowler’s reasoning processes, which were by nature singularly lucid and exact, showed at times a remarkable subtlety—­as if some extraneous hybrid faculty had been grafted on the simple parent stock of her mind.

“I can’t help feeling, though,” resumed the practical little lady before Gabriella had reached the end of her analysis, “that I’d be a great deal happier at this minute if we’d been poor all our lives.”

“It wouldn’t have suited George,” observed George’s wife with an inflection of irony.

“He mightn’t have liked it, but I believe it would have been a great deal better for him,” replied Mrs. Fowler, while she bowed gravely to a woman in a passing victoria.  “There are many things George can’t be blamed for, and the way he was brought up is one of them.  Of course, he’s no good whatever as a business man—­his father hardly ever sees him in the office—­but it’s useless to scold him about it, for it only exasperates him.  But he might have been a sensible, steady boy, if he had been brought up in some small place in the South where there was nothing to tempt him.”