o arrive.

But several things stood in his way, things a man of far more
intelligence would have found it hard to overcome.

Like nearly all saloon-keepers, he was serf to a brewery; and
the particular brewery whose beer his mortgage compelled
him to push did not make a beer that could be pushed. People
complained that it had a disagreeably bitter aftertaste. In
the second place, Mrs. Lange was a born sitter. She had
married to rest--and she was resting. She was always piled
upon a chair. Thus, she was not an aid but a hindrance, an
encourager of the help in laziness and slovenliness. Again,
the cooking was distinctly bad; the only really good thing the
house served was coffee, and that was good only in the
mornings. Finally, Lange was a saver by nature and not a
spreader. He could hold tightly to any money he closed his
stubby fingers upon; he did not know how to plant money and
make it grow, but only how to hoard.

Thus it came to pass that, after the first spurt, the business
fell back to about where it had been before Susan came.
Albert, the Austrian waiter, explained to Susan why it was that
her popularity did the house apparently so little
good--explained with truth where she suspected kind-hearted
plotting, that she had arrested its latterly swift-downward
slide. She was glad to hear what he had to say, as it was most
pleasant to her vanity; but she could not get over the
depression of the central fact--she was not making the sort of
business to justify asking Lange for more than board and lodging;
she was not in the way of making the money that was each
day more necessary, as her little store dwindled.

The question of getting money to live on is usually dismissed
in a princely way by writers about human life. It is in
reality, except with the few rich, the ever-present
question--as ever-present as the necessity of breathing--and it
is not, like breathing, a matter settled automatically. It
dominates thought; it determines action. To leave it out of
account ever, in writing a human history, is to misrepresent
and distort as utterly as would a portrait painter who
neglected to give his subject eyes, or a head, even. With the
overwhelming mass of us, money is at all times all our lives
long the paramount question--for to be without it is
destruction worse than death, and we are almost all perilously
near to being without it. Thus, airily to pass judgment upon
men and women as to their doings