fty, but stingy; not alone taciturn but quite
conversationless. His silences had not proceeded from the unplumbed
depths of his knowledge. He merely had nothing to say. She learned, too,
that the ten thousand dollars, soon dispelled, had been made for him by
an energetic and shrewd business partner with whom he had quarrelled
and from whom he had separated a few months before.

There never was another lump sum of ten thousand of Hermie Slocum's
earning.

Well. Forty years ago, having made the worst of it you made the best of
it. No going home to mother. The word "incompatibility" had not come
into wide-spread use. Incompatibility was a thing to hide, not to
flaunt. The years that followed were dramatic or commonplace, depending
on one's sense of values. Certainly those years were like the married
years of many another young woman of that unplastic day. Hannah Winter
had her job cut out for her and she finished it well, and alone. No
reproaches. Little complaint. Criticism she made in plenty, being the
daughter of a voluble mother; and she never gave up hope of stiffening
the spine of the invertebrate Hermie.

The ten thousand went in driblets. There never was anything dashing or
romantic about Hermie Slocum's failures. The household never felt actual
want, nor anything so picturesque as poverty. Hannah saw to that.

You should have read her letters back home to Chicago--to her mother and
father back home on Rush Street, in Chicago; and to her girlhood
friends, Sarah Clapp, Vinie Harden, and Julia Pierce. They were letters
that, for stiff-lipped pride and brazen boasting, were of a piece with
those written by Sentimental Tommy's mother when things were going worst
with her.

"My wine-coloured silk is almost worn out," she wrote. "I'm thinking of
making it over into a tea-gown with one of those new cream pongee panels
down the front. Hermie says he's tired of seeing me in it, evenings. He
wants me to get a blue but I tell him I'm too black for blue. Aren't men
stupid about clothes! Though I pretend to Hermie that I think his taste
is excellent, even when he brings me home one of those expensive beaded
mantles I detest."

Bald, bare-faced, brave lying.

The two children arrived with mathematical promptness--first Horace,
named after his grandfather Winter, of course; then Martha, named after
no one in particular, but so called because Hermie Slocum insisted,
stubbornly, that Martha was a good name for a girl. Marth