and last he heard a great deal about saving at Blodgett's. Aggie,
who was making up her white things, had something to tell every evening
almost, about the price of insertion. But it was saving for a purpose;
they were in the way, most of them, of being investors. J. Wilkinson had
sixty dollars in his brother's cigar stand on Fifty-fourth street. He
used to let his brother off for Sunday afternoons with quite a
proprietary air. The shoe gentleman, whose very juvenile name was Wally
Whitaker, didn't believe in such a mincing at prosperity. He talked
freely about tips and corners and margins and had been known to make
twenty-seven dollars in copper once. He offered Peter some exclusive
inside information in B and C's before he had been in the house a month.

"Well, you see," Peter explained himself, "I'm buying a farm up our
way!" His fellow boarders laid down their forks to look at him; he could
see reflected from their several angles how he had placed himself by the
mere statement of his situation. He felt at once the resistance it gave
him, the sense of something to pull against, of having got his feet
under him. It was the point at which the conquest of the mortgage dragon
began to present itself to him as a thing accomplished rather than a
thing escaped.

It must have been this feeling of release which opened up for him, from
pictures that he saw occasionally with Miss Havens on Sundays, from
books he read and discussed with her, avenues that appeared to lead more
or less directly to the House. There were times when he found himself
walking in them with Miss Minnie Havens, and yet always curiously
expecting the Lovely Lady when they found her there, to be quite another
person. He came within an inch of telling her about it on the occasion
on which she presented him with an embroidered hat marker for Christmas,
and when he took her to the theatre with tickets the floor walker had
presented to him on account of Mrs. Floor Walker not feeling up to it.
It appeared, further, that Miss Havens had a way of falling into
profound psychological difficulties which required a vast amount of
talking over, and a great many appeals to Peter's disinterested judgment
to extract her, not without some subtle intimations of dizzying escapes
for himself. Peter supposed that was always the way with girls. It came
to a crisis later where Miss Havens' whole destiny hung upon the point
as to whether she could accept a situation offered her