e began, then decided against saying anything discouraging.
"It seems cramped to us," said she, "after the house we had till
a couple of years ago. I guess we'll make out, somehow."

The family paid twenty dollars a month for the flat. The
restaurant earned twelve to fifteen a week; and the son, Ashbel,
stocky, powerful and stupid, had a steady job as porter at ten
a week. He gave his mother seven, as he had a room to himself
and an enormous appetite. He talked of getting married; if he
did marry, the family finances would be in disorder. But his
girl had high ideas, being the daughter of a grocer who fancied
himself still an independent merchant though he was in fact the
even more poorly paid selling agent of the various food products
trusts. She had fixed twenty a week as the least on which she
would marry; his prospects of any such raise were--luckily for
his family--extremely remote; for he had nothing but physical
strength to sell, and the price of physical strength alone was
going down, under immigrant competition, not only in actual wages
like any other form of wage labor, but also in nominal wages.

Altogether, the Brashears were in excellent shape for a tenement
family, were better off than upwards of ninety per cent of the
families of prosperous and typical Cincinnati. While it was true
that old Tom Brashear drank, it was also true that he carefully
limited himself to two dollars a week. While it was true that he
could not work at his trade and apparently did little but sit
round and talk--usually high above his audience--nevertheless he
was the actual head of the family and its chief bread-winner. It
was his savings that were invested in the restaurant; he bought
the supplies and was shrewd and intelligent about that vitally
important department of the business--the department whose
mismanagement in domestic economy is, next to drink, the main
cause of failure and pauperism, of sickness, of premature
disability, of those profound discouragements that lead to
despair. Also, old Brashear had the sagacity and the nagging
habit that are necessary to keeping people and things up to the
mark. He had ideas--practical ideas as well as ideals--far above
his station. But for him the housekeeping would have been in the
familiar tenement fashion of slovenliness and filth, and the
family would have been neat only on Sundays, and only on the
surface then. Because he had the habit of speaking of himself as