hundred a month and yet he never
seemed short. He dressed well, too--or neatly, to be nearer the truth;
there was no great style to his make-up. Of course, Brauer was not
married, but Starratt could never remember a time, even before he took
the plunge into matrimony, when he was not going through the motions
of smoothing old Wetherbee into a good-humored acceptance of an IOU
tag. Starratt did not think himself extravagant, and it always had
puzzled him to observe how free some of his salaried friends were with
their coin. Only that morning his wife had reflected his own mood with
exaggerated petulancy when she had said:

"I'm sure I don't know where all the money goes! We don't spend it on
cafes, and we haven't a car, and goodness knows I only buy what I have
to when it comes down to clothes."

What she _had_ to! He thought over the phrase not with any desire to
put Helen in the pillory, but merely to uncover, if possible, the
source of their economic ills.

In days gone by, when his mother was alive, he had heard almost the
same remark leveled at his father:

"Well, I suppose _some_ people could save on our income. But we've got
to be decent--we can't go about in rags!"

He knew from long experience just the sort his mother had meant by the
term "some people." Brauer was a case in point. Mrs. Starratt always
spoke of such as he with lofty tolerance.

"Oh, of course, _foreigners_ always get on! They're accustomed to live
that way!"

Fred Starratt had not altogether accepted his mother's philosophy that
everybody lacking the grace of an Anglo-Saxon or Scotch name was a
foreigner. There were times when he was given to wonder vaguely why
the gift of "getting on" had been given to "foreigners" and denied
him. Once in a while he rebelled against the implied gentility which
had been wished on him. Were rags necessary to achieve economy?
Granting the premises, in moments of rare revolt he became hospitable
to any contingency that would free him from the ever-present
humiliation of an empty purse.

He soon had learned that the term "rags" was a mere figure of speech,
which stood for every pretense offered up as a sacrifice upon the
altar of appearances. His mother had never been a spendthrift and
certainly one could not convict Helen on such a charge. But they both
had one thing in common--they "had to have things" for almost any and
every occasion. If a trip were planned or a dancing party arranged or
a tea project