the plunge into matrimony, when he was not going through the motions
of smoothing old Wetherbee into a good-humored acceptance of an IOU
tag. Starratt did not think himself extravagant, and it always had
puzzled him to observe how free some of his salaried friends were with
their coin. Only that morning his wife had reflected his own mood with
exaggerated petulancy when she had said:

"I'm sure I don't know where all the money goes! We don't spend it on
cafés, and we haven't a car, and goodness knows I only buy what I have
to when it comes down to clothes."

What she _had_ to! He thought over the phrase not with any desire to
put Helen in the pillory, but merely to uncover, if possible, the
source of their economic ills.

In days gone by, when his mother was alive, he had heard almost the
same remark leveled at his father:

"Well, I suppose _some_ people could save on our income. But we've got
to be decent--we can't go about in rags!"

He knew from long experience just the sort his mother had meant by the
term "some people." Brauer was a case in point. Mrs. Starratt always
spoke of such as he with lofty tolerance.

"Oh, of course, _foreigners_ always get on! They're accustomed to live
that way!"

Fred Starratt had not altogether accepted his mother's philosophy that
everybody lacking the grace of an Anglo-Saxon or Scotch name was a