, leaving it blue-white. "Fifty thousand a year!
You're mad. It can't be!"

"Yes'um. Fifty thousand at least."

Nancy's pallor increased. She closed her eyes.

"Don't do that," Billy said sharply. "No woman can faint on me just
because she's had money left her. You make me feel like the ghost of
Hamlet's father."

Nancy clutched at his sleeve.

"Don't, Billy!" she besought. "I'm past joking now. Fifty thousand a
year! Why, Uncle Elijah bought fifteen-dollar suits and fifteen-cent
lunches. How could a retired sea captain get all that money by
investing in a little rubber, and getting to be president of a little
rubber company?"

"That's how. Be a good sensible girl, and face the music."

"I'll have to give up the tea-room."

Billy laid a consolatory arm over her shoulder, and patted her
awkwardly.

"Cheer up," he said, "there's worse things in this world than money.
The time may come when you'll be grateful to your poor little old
uncle, for his nifty little fifty thousand per annum."

Nancy turned a tragic face to him.

"I tell you I'm not grateful to him," she said, "and I doubt if I ever
will be. I don't want the stupid money. I want to work life out in my
own way. I know I've got it in me, and I want my chance to prove it. I
want to give myself, my own brain and strength, to the job I've
selected as mine. Now, it's all spoiled for me. I'm subsidized. I'm
done for, and I can't see any way out of it."

"You can give the money away."

"I can't. Giving money away is a special science of itself. If I
devote my life to doing that as it should be done, I won't have time
or energy for anything else. I'm not a philanthropist in that sense. I
wanted my restaurant to be philanthropic only incidentally. I wanted
to cram my patrons with the full value of their money's worth of good
nourishing food; to increase the efficiency of hundreds of people who
never suspected I was doing it, by scientific methods of feeding.
That's my dream."

"A good little dream, all right."

"To make people eat the right food; to help them to a fuller and more
effective use of themselves by supplying them with the proper fuel for
their functions."

"You could buy a chain of restaurants with the money you've got."

"I don't want a chain of restaurants."

"You can endow a perpetual diet squad. You can buy out the whole Life
Extension Institute. If you would only stop to think of the advantages
of having all the money you wanted to