r marriage, he was always close about money."

"I had three dozen forks and spoons in the beginning," she resumed as if
there were no piercing significance in the fact she stated so simply,
"but I've sold them all now, one or two at a time, when I needed a
little money of my own. He has always paid the bills, but he never gave
me a cent in my life to do as I pleased with."

"I can't take it from you, Aunt Belinda. It would burn my fingers."

"It's mine. I've got a right to do as I choose with it," she persisted
almost passionately, "and I'd rather give it to you than buy anything in
the world." Something in her face--the look of one who has risen to a
generous impulse and finds happiness in the sacrifice--checked the hand
with which he was thrusting the money away from him. He was deeply
touched by her act; it was useless for him to pretend either to her or
to himself that she had not touched him. The youth in him, unfettered,
strong, triumphant, pitied her because she was no longer young; the
artist in him pitied her because she was no longer beautiful. Without
these two things, or at least one of these two, what was life worth to a
woman?

"I'll take it on condition that you'll let me pay it back as soon as I
get out of debt to Uncle Cyrus," he said in obedience to Susan's
imploring nod.

To this she agreed after an ineffectual protest. "You needn't think
about paying it back to me," she insisted; "I haven't anything to spend
money on now, so it doesn't make much difference whether I have any or
not. I can help you a little more after a while," she finished with
enthusiasm. "I'm raising a few squabs out in the back yard, and Meadows
is going to buy them as soon as they are big enough to eat."

An embarrassment out of all proportion to the act which produced it held
him speechless while he gazed at her. He felt at first merely a sense of
physical revolt from the brutality of her self-revelation--from the
nakedness to which she had stripped the horror of her marriage under the
eyes of her daughter. Nothing, not even the natural impulse to screen
one's soul from the gaze of the people with whom one lived, had
prevented the appalling indignity of this exposure. The delusion that it
is possible for a woman by mere virtue of being a woman to suffer in
sweetness and silence, evaporated as he looked at her. He had believed
her to be a nonentity, and she was revealing an inner life as intense,
as real, as acutely persona