She shrank within herself and sat quiet, her gaze fixed upon her hands lying limp in her lap.

“There is no reason why your father shouldn’t be made absolutely comfortable and happy.  That’s the way to get the best results from a man of his sort.”

She faded on toward the self-effacing blank he had first known.

“Think it out, Dorothy,” he said in his frankest, kindliest way.  “You’ll see I’m right.”

“No,” she said.

“No?  What does that mean?”

“I’ve an instinct against it,” replied she.  “I’d rather father and I kept on as we are.”

“But that’s impossible.  You’ve no right to live in this small, cramping way.  You must broaden out and give him room to grow. . . .  Isn’t that sensible?”

“It sounds so,” she admitted.  “But—­” She gazed round helplessly—­“I’m afraid!”

“Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then don’t bother about it.”

“I’ll have to be very—­careful,” she said thoughtfully.

“As you please,” replied he.  “Only, don’t live and think on a ten-dollar-a-week basis.  That isn’t the way to get on.”

He never again brought up the matter in direct form.  But most of his conversation was indirect and more or less subtle suggestions as to ways of branching out.  She moved cautiously for a few days, then timidly began to spend money.

There is a notion widely spread abroad that people who have little money know more about the art of spending money and the science of economizing than those who have much.  It would be about as sensible to say that the best swimmers are those who have never been near the water, or no nearer than a bath tub.  Anyone wishing to be convinced need only make an excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage barrels overflowing with spoiled food—­or the trashy goods exposed for sale in the shops and the markets.  Those who have had money and have lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift.  Those who have never had money are almost invariably prodigal—­because they are ignorant.  When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family had had money.  But never since she could remember had they been anything but poor.

She did not know how to spend money.  She did not know prices or values—­being in that respect precisely like the mass of mankind—­and womankind—­who imagine they are economical because they hunt so-called bargains and haggle with merchants who have got doubly ready for them by laying in inferior goods and by putting up prices in advance.  She knew how much ten dollars a week was, the meaning of the twenty to thirty dollars a week her father had made.  But she had only a faint—­and exaggeratedly mistaken—­notion about sixty-five hundred a year—­six and a half thousands.  It seemed wealth to her, so vast that a hundred thousand a year would have seemed no more.  As soon as she drifted away from the known course—­the thirty to forty dollars a week upon which they had been living—­Dorothea Hallowell was in a trackless sea, with a broken compass and no chart whatever.  A common enough experience in America, the land of sudden changes of fortune, of rosiest hopes about “striking it rich,” of carelessness and ignorance as to values, of eager and untrained appetite for luxury and novelty of any and every kind.