At first any expenditure, however small, for the plainest comfort which had been beyond their means seemed a giddy extravagance.  But a bank account—­and a check book—­soon dissipated that nervousness.  A few charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing a check, and she was almost at her ease.  With people who have known only squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation and slow accumulation, the spreading out process is usually slow—­not so slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid.  A piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check.  With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading is a tropical, overnight affair.

Counting all she spent and arranged to spend in those first few weeks, you had no great total.  But it was great for a girl who had been making ten dollars a week.  Also there were sown in her mind broadcast and thick the seeds of desire for more luxurious comfort, of need for it, that could never be uprooted.

Norman came over almost every evening.  He got a new and youthful and youth-restoring kind of pleasure out of this process of expansion.  He liked to hear each trifling detail, and he was always making suggestions that bore immediate fruit in further expenditure.  When he again brought up the subject of a larger house, she listened with only the faintest protests.  Her ideas of such a short time before seemed small, laughably small now.  “Father was worrying only this morning because he is so cramped,” she admitted.

“We must remedy that at once,” said Norman.

[Illustration:  “‘It has killed me,’ he groaned.”]

And on the following Sunday he and she went house hunting.  They found a satisfactory place—­peculiarly satisfactory to Norman because it was near the Hudson tunnel, and so only a few minutes from his office.  To Dorothy it loomed a mansion, almost a palace.  In fact it was a modestly roomy old-fashioned brick house, with a brick stable at the side that, with a little changing, would make an admirable laboratory.

“You haven’t the time—­or the experience—­to fit this place up,” said Norman.  “I’ll attend to it—­that is, I’ll have it attended to.”  Seeing her uneasy expression, he added:  “I can get much better terms.  They’d certainly overcharge you.  There’s no sense in wasting money—­is there?”

“No,” she admitted, convinced.

He gave the order to a firm of decorators.  It was a moderate order, considering the amount of work that had to be done.  But if the girl had seen the estimates Norman indorsed, she would have been terrified.  However, he saw to it that she did not see them; and she, ignorant of values, believed him when he told her the general account of the corporation must be charged with two thousand dollars.