last at least a year longer."

Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or
disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood
her, but had been inwardly following the same train of thought.

"You mean," he enquired after a pause, "without counting your
grandmother's pearls?"

"Yes--without the pearls."

He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper:
"Tell me again just how."

"Let's sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best." He
stretched himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on
a heap of boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee.
Just above her, when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of
moonflooded sky incrusted like silver in a sharp black
patterning of plane-boughs. All about them breathed of peace
and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so acute that it
was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of bills
and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared.
"People with a balance can't be as happy as all this," Susy
mused, letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.

People with a balance had always been Susy Branch's bugbear;
they were still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing's.
She detested them, detested them doubly, as the natural enemies
of mankind and as the people one always had to put one's self