lation. Otherwise, she was
apparently in a healthy, normal condition and would suffer no
intolerable hardship. This pleased and soothed Angela greatly. It gave
her a club wherewith to strike her lord--a chain wherewith to bind him.
She did not want to act at once. It was too serious a matter. She wanted
time to think. But it was pleasant to know that she could do this.
Unless Eugene sobered down now----

During the time in which he had been working for the Summerfield Company
and since then for the Kalvin Company here in Philadelphia, Eugene, in
spite of the large salary he was receiving--more each year--really had
not saved so much money. Angela had seen to it that some of his earnings
were invested in Pennsylvania Railroad stock, which seemed to her safe
enough, and in a plot of ground two hundred by two hundred feet at Upper
Montclair, New Jersey, near New York, where she and Eugene might some
day want to live. His business engagements had necessitated considerable
personal expenditures, his opportunity to enter the Baltusrol Golf Club,
the Yere Tennis Club, the Philadelphia Country Club, and similar
organizations had taken annual sums not previously contemplated, and the
need of having a modest automobile, not a touring car, was obvious. His
short experience with that served as a lesson, however, for it was found
to be a terrific expense, entirely disproportionate to his income. After
paying for endless repairs, salarying a chauffeur wearisomely, and
meeting with an accident which permanently damaged the looks of his
machine, he decided to give it up. They could rent autos for all the
uses they would have. And so that luxury ended there.

It was curious, too, how during this time their Western home relations
fell rather shadowily into the background. Eugene had not been home now
for nearly two years, and Angela had seen only David of all her family
since she had been in Philadelphia. In the fall of their third year
there Angela's mother died and she returned to Blackwood for a short
time. The following spring Eugene's father died. Myrtle moved to New
York; her husband, Frank Bangs, was connected with a western furniture
company which was maintaining important show rooms in New York. Myrtle
had broken down nervously and taken up Christian Science, Eugene heard.
Henry Burgess, Sylvia's husband, had become president of the bank with
which he had been so long connected, and had sold his father's paper,
the Alexandria _