f a
greater love. By a swift transition her father assumed the sympathetic
role in the domestic drama. She chanced upon novels in which the spurned
husband was exalted to the shame of the dishonorable wife. Her father
fitted well into this picture. She even added herself to the _dramatis
personae_, not without a sense of her value in the scene. But these were
only passing phases. There was no morbid strain in Phil. Her father was
the best of companions, and she was quick to recognize his fineness and
gentleness and to appreciate his cultivation with its background of
solid learning.

Phil's question startled her father. Money had never been discussed in
the household, and this new gravity in his daughter's eyes troubled him.
Phil's needs had been few; her demands had burdened him little. Her
aunts had bought her clothes and sent him the bills. When he gave her
money to spend, he never asked for an accounting, though he was often
amused by the uses to which she put it; and sometimes he had been
touched by her gifts at Christmas or on his birthdays, which ranged from
a reckless investment in gay neckties to a set of some author whose
definitive edition he had coveted--Shelley or Landor or Matthew Arnold.
No; money was not a subject that had interested Phil, and her father
found her direct question disconcerting.

"No, Phil. We are not rich--far from it. It's hardly possible for a
lawyer to grow rich in a town like this. But I haven't been doing as
well as I could lately. I've got to do better and I must be about it."

He drew himself up in his chair and glanced at his watch. It had
stopped, and as the court-house clock boomed eight he set it. It was
quite like him to allow his watch to run down.

"I was in your office yesterday, daddy, and I hope you won't mind, but I
was straightening your desk and I couldn't help seeing some old bills.
Several of them had been there a long time. My graduating dress hasn't
been paid for--and some things like that. We must economize until those
bills are paid. And I was thinking that you ought to get more money out
of the building. Rents are going up on Main Street. I heard Paul Fosdick
say so. You ought to raise the clothing store rent right away. I don't
know of any easier way of getting money," she added drolly, "than by
wringing it from the tenants."

She laughed, to make it easier for him.

"Yes; that's one way of doing it; only Bernstein had a long lease that
expires--I'm not