One of the consequences of Darwin’s delicate health was, that he was more or less anxious about money. When you can count on your physical strength for fighting circumstance, you can float cheerfully out into the world and let your daily support come where you can get it. But if you are weak, crippled, and hampered, if you are absolutely dependent upon the comforts which others merely enjoy but can do without, you look with dread upon the possibility of losing what alone assures you of the indispensable. Darwin was not altogether free from this feeling, and his son tells us that he was haunted by the fear that his children would not have health to earn their own living yet might be obliged to do so.[271] In consequence he was always thoughtful and careful in money matters. He looked after his investments with shrewd intelligence, and respected the faculty of making money and keeping it. He was not above saving a penny where it could be done, and especially he was exact and systematic about his expenditure. His biographer says that ‘he kept accounts with great care, classifying them, and balancing at the end of the year like a merchant. I remember the quick way in which he would reach out for his account book to enter each check paid, as though he were in a hurry to get it entered before he had forgotten it.’[272] An interesting contradiction to this financial exactitude and to Darwin’s ordinary habits of accuracy is his inveterate carelessness in not dating or not fully dating his letters.