re the house--"

Phil had been studiously stuccoing her toast with marmalade, and she bit
into it before looking at her father.

"You know perfectly well what I mean, Phil. This is a serious time in
your life. You've got to adapt yourself to the ways of the world--the
world of convention. You must consider yourself as a member of society.
It's only in a limited sense that we can be individualists. And I can't
have my daughter weighed down with such cares as these you threaten to
assume. It would hurt me more than I can tell you if I believed it
necessary. But it isn't necessary. None the less I know perfectly well
that if it were necessary you would be equal to it--you are equal to
anything you undertake. But I can't have you wasting yourself on such
things."

"Daddy dear, this is getting terribly philosophical. Let us be really
serious for a little bit. You know, we haven't much money, have we? Not
very much, anyhow."

She had broached the matter as delicately as possible. It had been in
her mind that she must speak to her father about their affairs, but she
had not thought the opportunity would offer so quickly. It was hard to
say to him that she had undertaken to manage the housekeeping as an
economical measure; that she knew he owed money that he had no immediate
prospect of paying.

The hurt look that she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking.
When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she
had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been
above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation
of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they
had established in her a belief that her mother was a bad woman: the
facts spoke for themselves. And having had a bad mother it was incumbent
upon Phil to choose her path with a particular care and to walk in it
circumspectly.

Phil had, by this time, considered the case from the changing viewpoints
natural to the young mind. In that rosy light through which a girl of
fifteen is apt to view life,--the first realizations of sex, the age of
the first novels,--Phil had not been free from the contemplation of her
mother as a romantic figure. For a woman to forsake a husband for a
lover was not without precedents. Phil had dreamed over this a good
deal, in an impersonal sort of way, and the unknown mother had been
glorified in scenes of renunciation, following nobly the high call o