t friends her qualities
can make her, absolutely unaided but for her own exertions, for four
years, is not to be called lacking in application, I submit. She got
out of that business just what there was in it, _and so_, she insists,
_she did at every stage of her subsequent history_. Note this, for it
is important.

Here you see her, then, at twenty-two; handsome, accomplished,
independent, well-rated on her particular 'Change--one fairly hears
Dick Whittington's bells in the air! Her mother, when Molly wrote home
the news of her appointment as under-reader in the office of one of the
new cheap magazines that began to appear with such frequency at about
that time, spoke of her with the typical respect of the dependent woman
for the wage-earner, and never dropped that note till the crash came.
Mr. Dickett was head clerk by now, with an appreciable advance in
salary; and Eleanor's wedding (it was in dressing the Roodscreen at
Christmas that young Farwell met his fate), with her sisters as
bridemaids, marked a distinct stage in the family's social career. Old
Mr. Farwell, who had long been nursing his only son's bank position,
did the handsome thing for the young couple, and stomached, very
decently, what must have been his regret at the boy's choice--for we
all like our children to "look up and not down," as the motto suggests,
in these matters. And he was paid for it, for Eleanor made a man of
the boy and a vestryman to boot, and quite won the old man's heart,
though he never loved Mrs. Dickett.

By the time Molly had been for two years at her post in _Slater's
Monthly_, Kathryn had moved back to her normal-school as
instructor--"and they paid well to get her, too," as Mr. Dickett
informed his stenographer confidentially. She had been invited to
supper more than once, had the stenographer, in the old days, and there
had even been a little talk of Kathryn's acquiring this accomplishment,
once, but Mr. Dickett was far too wise to suggest her presence at the
half-past six dinner now-a-days. He was far too wise, indeed, to do
anything that seemed likely to ruffle the increasingly easy currents
into which his bark had drifted of late. In a vague way he had always
counted on supporting four women until three of them--or two, say, for
Kathryn was plain and rather managing--should marry; and lo and behold,
all three were off his hands in a twinkle, and there was a pretty
little nest-egg growing for little Henry (for El