could I ask her? I didn't know. For when
would I be earning enough to ask any girl to marry me? At present nearly
all I earned was swallowed up by expenses at home, and I knew that in
all likelihood this drain would soon grow heavier.

For we could not count much longer on my father's salary. Already I had
done my best to make him give up his position. He stubbornly resisted.

"I'm strong as I ever was," he declared, and he took great pains to
prove it. He would sit down to dinner, his face heavy and gray with
fatigue, but by a hard visible effort slowly he would throw it off,
keenly questioning me about my work, more often quizzing me about it, or
Sue about her "revolooters." He had a stock of these dry remarks and he
used them over and over. When the same jokes came night after night we
knew he was very tired. After dinner on such evenings, when I went with
him into his study to smoke, he would invariably settle back in his
chair with the same loud "Ah!" of comfort, and he would follow this up
as he lit his cigar with the most obvious grunts expressive of health to
prove to me how strong he was. He was always grimly delighted when I
spent these evenings with him, but always before his cigar was out his
head would sink slowly over his book and soon he would be sound asleep.
Then as I sat at my writing I would glance over from time to time. I
could tell when he was waking, and at once I would grow absorbed in my
work. Soon I would hear a slight snort of surprise, I would hear him
stealthily feel for his book, and then presently out of the silence----

"This is a devilish good piece of writing, boy," he would announce
abruptly. "When _you_ learn to hold your reader like this I'll begin to
think you're a writer."

Yes, my father was aging fast, I would soon be the only breadwinner
here. Sue fought hard against this idea, she was still set on finding
work for herself, but each time she proposed it Dad would rise so
indignantly, with such evident pain in his glaring old eyes, that she
would be forced to give up her plan. In such talks I supported him, and
in return when we two were alone Sue would revenge herself on me by the
most cutting comments on "this inane habit of looking at girls as fit
for nothing better than marriage."

These comments, I was well aware, were aimed at my feeling for Eleanore,
for whom Sue had no longer any good word but only a smiling derision.
Her remarks were straight out of Bernard Shaw's mo