of domestics, and
furnished Redcross--especially young Redcross--with country-house
hospitalities and gay gatherings, which they would otherwise have
lacked. Yet fanatics of young people like Annie and Rose Millar, who
were persuaded that they were now well acquainted with a reverse of
fortune, began to behave as if they considered it was no longer the
_creme de la creme_ of human experience to amass and retain a fortune.
They began to pity the rampantly prosperous family for the lack on their
part of any knowledge of life's vicissitudes, with their trumpet call to
earnest effort and supreme self-devotion--all that makes man or woman
worthy of the name. As for the younger Dyers, they were content to echo
the sentiments of their mouthpiece, the head of their house. He spoke in
the privacy of his family with a half-affable, half-contemptuous concern
for those unfortunate beggars of uppish Redcross townspeople who had all
come to smash by the failure of one paltry twopenny-halfpenny local
bank.

The Millars were constantly hearing of fresh examples of hardship, and
courage to meet the hardship, piquing and inciting them to enterprise
and self-sacrifice on their own account. Now it would be May, who would
come in from Miss Burridge's with a blanched face, crying, "Oh! you
girls, do you know Ella Carey has gone and is not coming back again?
Phyllis is crying her eyes out, because she and Ella were never
separated before. No, Ella has not gone to be a lady-help, as she
thought she might do, after she had got a little more practice in
washing dishes and peeling potatoes. It is nothing bad, except that she
is gone for good and all, and it has been so sudden. And Mrs. Carey says
Ella is not to come back. One of her sisters, the one without children,
Mrs. Tyrrel, wrote and offered to take either of the girls. And what do
you think Mrs. Carey said? That Ella must go, because if she went there
would be a mouth less to feed. She was sorry, because she said it was
giving up Ella, and she told her she must not expect to have much more
to do with Phyllis and the rest of them at home, for it would be out of
the question, in the different circumstances of the Tyrrels and Careys,
for them to carry on frequent or intimate intercourse. Ella would have
refused if she had dared, for she is so fond of Phyllis and all of them,
even of her mother, though she has grown very hard since the bank
failed. She used to let the girls have their own way.