stitutional to say
to her:

"I hope you didn't think I was behind him in what he said to you about
going away?"

Mildred had not thought so, but in her mother's guilty tone and
guiltier eyes she now read that her mother wished her to go.

"It'd be awful for me to be left here alone with him," wailed her
mother insincerely. "Of course we've got no money, and beggars can't
be choosers. But it'd just about kill me to have you go."

Mildred could not speak.

"I don't know a thing about money," Mrs. Presbury went on. "Your
father always looked after everything." She had fallen into the way of
speaking of her first husband as part of some vague, remote past,
which, indeed, he had become for her. "This man"--meaning
Presbury--"has only about five thousand a year, as you know. I suppose
that's as small as he says it is. I remember our bills for one month
used to be as much or more than that." She waved her useless, pretty
hands helplessly. "I don't see HOW we are to get on, Mildred!"

Her mother wished her to go! Her mother had fallen under the influence
of Presbury--her mother, woman-like, or rather, ladylike, was of kin to
the helpless, flabby things that float in the sea and attach themselves
to whatever they happen to lodge against. Her mother wished her to go!

"At the same time," Mrs. Presbury went on, "I can't live without
somebody here to stand between me and him. I'd kill him or kill
myself."

Mildred muttered some excuse and fled from the room, to lock herself in.

But when she came forth again to descend to dinner, she had resolved
nothing, because there was nothing to resolve. When she was a child
she leaned from the nursery window one day and saw a stable-boy
drowning a rat that was in a big, oval, wire cage with a wooden bottom.
The boy pressed the cage slowly down in the vat of water. The rat, in
the very top of the cage, watched the floor sink, watched the water
rise. And as it watched it uttered a strange, shrill, feeble sound
which she could still remember distinctly and terribly. It seemed to
her now that if she were to utter any sound at all, it would be that
one.

II

ON the Monday before Thanksgiving, Presbury went up to New York to look
after one of the little speculations in Wall Street at which he was so
clever. Throughout the civilized world nowadays, and especially in and
near the great capitals of finance, there is a class of men and women
of small capital and of a c