these new conditions, and which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse
wherever they went.

Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether
beyond the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's
houses, she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and
somewhat harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed
little parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it
was not in dreamland--so gay was the company, so light were the hearts,
which it sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one
of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his
own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of
an octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by
some force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
upward to dazzling heights of greatness.

At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they
were eight hundred dollars in debt.

The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
dollars in debt meant.

It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the
social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material