n of them. "You
are merely wasting time and sentiment on this young upstart of a country
lawyer, Elinor. So long as you were content to make it a summer day's
amusement, I had nothing to say; you are old enough and sensible enough to
choose your own recreations. But in justice to yourself, no less than to
him, you must let it end with our going home. You haven't money enough for
two."

Her eyes grew hot under the closed lids when she remembered. At the time
the hard saying was evoked there was money enough for two, if David Kent
would have shared it. But he had held his peace and gone away, and now
there was not enough for two.

Elinor faced her major weakness unflinchingly. She was not a slave to the
luxuries--the luxuries of the very rich. On the contrary, she had tried to
make herself believe that hardness was a part of her creed. But latterly,
she had been made to see that there was a formidable array of things which
she had been calling comforts: little luxuries which Brookes Ormsby's wife
might reckon among the simplest necessities of the daily life, but which
David Kent's wife might have to forego; nay, things which Elinor Brentwood
might presently have to forego. For she compelled herself to front the
fact of the diminished patrimony squarely. So long as the modest Western
Pacific dividends were forthcoming, they could live comfortably and
without pinching. But failing these----

"No, I'm not great enough," she confessed, with a little shiver. "I should
be utterly miserable. If I could afford to indulge in ideals it would be
different; but I can't--not when one word of mine will build a barrier so
high that all the soul-killing little skimpings can never climb over it.
And besides, I owe something to mother and Nell."

It was the final straw. When any weakness of the human heart can find a
seeming virtue to go hand in hand with it, the battle is as good as lost;
and at that moment Brookes Ormsby, placidly refilling his short pipe in
the smoking-room of the Pullman, was by no means in the hopeless case he
was sometimes tempted to fancy himself.

As may be surmised, a diligent suitor, old enough to plan thoughtfully,
and yet young enough to simulate the youthful ardor of a lover whose hair
has not begun to thin at the temples, would lose no ground in a three
days' journey and the opportunities it afforded.

In Penelope's phrase, Elinor "suffered him", enjoying her freedom from
care like a sleepy kitten; shut