lone? Let me help you."

He pressed her hand gently and she tried to withdraw it. At this he held
it fast, and she no longer protested. Then he slipped the greenbacks he
had into her palm, and when she began to protest, he whispered:

"I'll loan it to you--that's all right. I'll loan it to you."

He made her take it. She felt bound to him by a strange tie of affection
now. They went out, and he walked with her far out south toward Polk
Street, talking.

"You don't want to live with those people?" he said in one place,
abstractedly. Carrie heard it, but it made only a slight impression.

"Come down and meet me to morrow," he said, "and we'll go to the
matinee. Will you?"

Carrie protested a while, but acquiesced.

"You're not doing anything. Get yourself a nice pair of shoes and a
jacket."

She scarcely gave a thought to the complication which would trouble
her when he was gone. In his presence, she was of his own hopeful,
easy-way-out mood.

"Don't you bother about those people out there," he said at parting.
"I'll help you."

Carrie left him, feeling as though a great arm had slipped out before
her to draw off trouble. The money she had accepted was two soft, green,
handsome ten-dollar bills.

Chapter VII. THE LURE OF THE MATERIAL--BEAUTY SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and
comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing
primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due--that
it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped
privilege--many of our social, religious, and political troubles will
have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral
significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The
old definition: "Money: something everybody else has and I must get,"
would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she
now held in her hand--two soft, green ten-dollar bills--and she felt
that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was
something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would
have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of
money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that
in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no
conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would,
undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of hav