know your ideas. You think I ought to be frying chops for you and
giving praise because I have a nineteen-dollar near-taffeta dress. I
can just see you walking round a two-by-four back yard measuring the
corn and putting the watermelons into eiderdown sleeping bags so they
won't freeze; then telling everyone at the shop what an ideal home
life you lead! No, deary, I'm retrenching because it's a novelty, and
you would like to retrench----"

"Because I may be forced to do so. I hate to worry you--I never mean
to unless there is no other way out--but I must warn you that the
abnormal war conditions are no longer inflating business and everyone
is watching his step. I cannot take your father's place; he carved it
out step by step. I fairly aeroplaned to the top and found that while
I was sitting there in fancied security other people were busy
chopping down the steps and I should find myself having a great old
fall down to earth. Now----"

"Don't tell any more things," she murmured, deep in a fruit tart. "I
can't understand. You are a big, strong man. Go keep your fortune; let
me play. I'll retrench for fun, and you must love me for it."

"But you are not sincere," he protested. "You don't earn anything. You
don't save anything----"

Beatrice sat upright, laying aside her plate and fork. "So you believe
that, too," she half whispered.

"See here," Steve added, in desperation. "I wish we were back in the
apartment--or a simple house. I wish we kept a cook and a maid and you
had a simple outfit of clothes and a simple routine. I wish we were
just folks--you know the sort--you don't find them any place else but
America--it's a tremendous chance to be just folks if you would only
realize. I feel as if this were a soap-bubble castle, as if we were
deliberately playing a wrong game all round."

"You tell papa," she begged; "and if he thinks I'm unhappy he will
write me another check."

"Then the retrenching is to be the elimination of the
fifteen-dollar-a-week professional reader, who needs the work and
earns the money, and two courses from our already aldermanic meals?
What else?"

"I shall send the silver to the bank and use plate. The smartest
people do that. I shall make aunty embroider my monograms; she can as
well as not--the last were frightfully expensive. I'm going to bargain
sales after this, and take cook and drive out to the Polish market.
Why, things are two and three cents a pound cheaper----"

Steve ros