circumstances produced, she clung to her capacity to survive and
dominate like a staggered man to a stanchion.

In the mean time she was not positively suffering from either shock or
sorrow. From her personal point of view the loss of money was not of
itself an overpowering calamity. It might entail the disruption of
lifelong habits, but she was young enough not to be afraid of that. In
spite of a way of living that might be said to have given her the best
of everything, she had always known that her father's income was a small
one for his position in the world. As a family they had been in the
habit of associating on both sides of the Atlantic, with people whose
revenues were twice and thrice and ten times their own. The obligation
to keep the pace set by their equals had been recognized as a domestic
hardship ever since she could remember, though it was a mitigating
circumstance that in one way or another the money had always been found.
Guion, Maxwell & Guion was a well which, while often threatening to run
dry, had never failed to respond to a sufficiently energetic pumping.
She had known the thought, however--fugitive, speculatory, not dwelt
upon as a real possibility--that a day might come when it would do so no
more.

It was a thought that went as quickly as it came, its only importance
being that it never caused her a shudder. If it sometimes brought matter
for reflection, it was in showing her to herself in a light in which,
she was tolerably sure, she never appeared to anybody else--as the true
child of the line of frugal forebears, of sea-scouring men and
cheese-paring women, who, during nearly two hundred years of thrift, had
put penny to penny to save the Guion competence. Standing in the
cheerful "Colonial" hall which their stinting of themselves had made it
possible to build, and which was still furnished chiefly with the