broidered
silk stockings and the finest, silliest silk things ever put in a show
window to tempt the soul of a woman. But it took just two weeks and
three days to drive Casey back to his sour-dough can."

"He craved luxury more than you seemed to do," I remembered aloud.

"He did, yes. But his idea of luxury is sitting down in the kitchen to
a real meal of beans and biscuits and all the known varieties of jam
and those horrible whitewashed store cookies and having the noise of
the phonograph drowned every five minutes by a passing street car.
Casey wants four movies a day, and he wants them all funny. He brings
home silk shirts with the stripes fairly shrieking when he unwraps
them--and he has to be thrown and tied to get a collar on him.

"He will get up at any hour of the night to chase after a fire engine,
and every whipstitch he gets pinched for doing something which is
perfectly lawful and right in the desert and perfectly awful in the
city. You saw him," said the Little Woman, "to-day." And she added
wistfully, "It's the first time since we were married that he has ever
talked back--to me.

"And you know," she went on, shuffling the cards and stopping to regard
the joker attentively (though I am sure she didn't know what card she
was looking at), "just chasing around town and doing nothing but square
yourself for not playing according to the rules costs money without
getting you anywhere. Fifty-five thousand dollars isn't so much just
to play with, in this town. Casey's highest ambition now seems to be
nickel disk wheels on a new racing car that can make the speed cops go
some to catch him. His idea of economy is to put six or seven thousand
dollars into a car that will enable him to outrun a twenty-dollar fine!

"We have some money invested," she went on. "We own this apartment
house--and fortunately it's in my name. So long as the housing problem
continues critical, I think I can keep Casey going without spending our
last cent."

"He did one good stroke of business," I ventured, "when he bought this
place. Apartment houses are good as gold mines these days."

The Little Woman laughed. "Well-sir, it wasn't so much a stroke as it
was a wallop. Casey bought it just to show who was boss, he or the
landlord. The first thing he did when we moved in was to take down the
nicely framed rules that said we must not cook cabbage nor onions nor
fish, nor play music after ten o'clock at night, nor do any lou