at any cost; and she could never forget the grim days, after the death
of Uncle Beverly Blair, when they had shivered in fireless rooms and
gone for weeks without butter on their bread. For the one strong quality
in Mrs. Carr's character was the feeling she spoke of complacently,
though modestly, as "proper pride"; and this proper pride, which was
now resisting Gabriella's struggle for independence, had in the past
resisted quite as stubbornly the thought of an appeal to the ready
charity of her masculine relatives. To seek a man's advice had been from
her girlhood the primal impulse of Mrs. Carr's nature; but, until Fate
had starved her into sincerity, she had kept alive the ladylike fiction
that she was in need of moral, not material, assistance.

"Of course, if there were any other way, Arthur," said Gabriella,
remembering the earlier battles with her mother, and eager to compromise
when she could do so with dignity; "but how can I go on being dependent
on Cousin Jimmy and Uncle Meriweather. Neither of them is rich, and
Cousin Jimmy has a large family."

Of course she was reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about
Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being
reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility, felt
that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower order of
intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly because she had a
practical mind, and a practical mind is usually engrossed with material
matters.

"I understand exactly how you feel, dear, but if only you could go on
just as you are for a few years longer," said Arthur, sticking to his
original idea with a tenacity which made it possible for him to argue
for hours and yet remain exactly where he had started. Though they