“Stopped.” Architects, he went on with wry amusement, would soon be in the class of artists who conceived and executed those pleasures which are luxuries, such as--he paused to grin amiably at me--books. Our taxi hurled itself downtown along canons already shut in by more buildings than the frightened population needed. He laughed heartily at the corollary he now propounded: as he went down from usefulness in a man’s work, he automatically went up according to his wife’s circle. “However,” he said with a disheartened drop in his amusement, “she’s worried because she--well, then, because she’s Eva! She thinks I shan’t make enough money to keep us out of the poorhouse. I dislike to talk about such matters, Dinah; but you might put it in her head that she needn’t worry about the poorhouse. We--my mother and I--have a policy, as my father had--he learned it from his father, and so on back--to hold on to real estate. We’re strapped, but not smashed. If you could explain this to her?” I objected that this was clearly in his own province. He made a helpless gesture with his hands, thereby loosening his hold on his stick, which fell with a clatter and gave the excuse for bending and so hiding from me any actual realization he might have had about his wife. When he came up, a little red of face, he said indulgently that she was a child about money. “And, you see, she’s got it in her head that the falling away of my work is due to a corresponding falling to pieces of my reputation.” This he also laughed off indulgently, but not before I had seen that it had hurt him. And, still not having discussed her with any intimacy of detail, he again waved it off with a murmur that she was not adult when it came to a question of money. “She keeps saying that she is so afraid to be poor.” “She was poor, once,” I put in, “before she came to New York.” “Ah?” He seemed surprised. “I know nothing of that old life before she came to New York. Oh, I mean--naturally, I know the general outline. But I mean to say--you people charge on New York, and show your most sparkling side, and we take it for granted, you see, that you were always, and everywhere, brilliant and prosperous and on the crest of the wave.” “That’s New York,” I said composedly. “And then, too, it’s impossible to think of Eva as ever having passed around the hat, so to speak,” he went on. I held him to the subject. “The city is in such a blue funk, just now, that it works on her; of itself, it would frighten her.”