Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle.  She had known its sharp corners and cruel edges.  At twenty-three, a strong, healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man twenty-two years her senior.  In their twenty-five years of married life together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could call her own.  Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was, according to the standards of that day.  There were three children:  Etta, the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo.  Her husband’s miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the spirit of many women.  But hard and glum as her old husband was he never quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun.  The habit of heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty became hers.  It showed in little hoarding ways:  in the saving of burned matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow.

Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business.  He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers, documents, agents.  He was forever poking around the house at hours when a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for masculine eyes.  Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced, stingy.  The mother and the boy turned to each other.  In a wordless way they grew very close, those two.  It was as if they were silently matched against the father and daughter.

It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in a Bronte brain.  The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when the financial avalanche of ’93 thundered across the continent sweeping Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the debris.  Stocks and bonds and real estate became paper, with paper value.  He clawed about with frantic, clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands more hopelessly hurt.  You saw him sitting for hours together with a black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down figures, muttering.  The bleak future that confronted them had little of terror for Hattie Mandle.  It presented no contrast with the bleakness of the past.  On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found.  Herman Handle’s sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the wake of the devastating panic.