ous to risk your anger for the sake of
righting this mistake you are making."

"My nieces are not in want. And familiarity with a certain degree of
poverty is the source of a wisdom that safeguards men and women from
follies that lead to many of the greatest miseries on earth."

"Want, my dear Tom, is a purely relative condition," said Miss
Bancroft. "There are needs, which to certain natures are more
intolerable than physical hunger. To deprive a young girl of simple,
innocent delights--companionship of her own kind, dainty clothes,
harmless enjoyments--is like robbing a plant of sun and rain."

"Do you mean to tell me that poverty need deprive any girl of such
things? Nonsense, Elizabeth! I have seen girls who had but two
dresses to their name, who worked and struggled and economized, and who
nevertheless had as much pleasure--indeed more, I'll wager--than the
most petted heiress in the land. And what's more, they made better
wives and better mothers and better citizens. They knew how many cents
make a dollar, and how many dollars their men could make in a week by
the sweat of their brow, working not eight hours a day, but ten and
twelve. One never heard this sickly whine from them--this talk that
women must be coddled and pampered, and that men can eat their hearts
out to provide the 'sun' in which they bask like pet lizards! They
didn't ask for 'sunlight'--they asked only that they might work and
save with their husbands--that they could be fit partners, and they
found their joy, not in 'dainty clothes' and 'harmless enjoyments' but
in giving their strength and their courage for their husbands and their
children!" Mr. Prescott had risen to his feet in the vehemence of his
feeling, and was walking back and forth, his hands locked behind his
back, and his head lowered and thrust forward between his hunched-up
shoulders.

"Good heavens, I've got him roused for fair," thought Miss Bancroft,
with a mixture of amusement and dismay. "And of course, theoretically
he's dead right. Now why is it that so many things which,
theoretically, are dead right, practically, are all wrong? That's what
I've got to prove to him--and I don't know whether I shall succeed
after all. I must take care not to be sentimental--that rouses him
dreadfully."

Aloud she said, in a quiet voice:

"Listen, Tom--under ordinary circumstances I should agree with you
absolutely. But a short time ago I spoke of want being relative. Yo