Mr. Share could not conceive what either of them could want with loose money. He was not averse, he admitted, from change and progress. With great breadth of mind he admitted that change and progress were inevitable. But his attitude towards these phenomena resembled that of the young St. Augustine towards another matter, who cried: "Give me chastity, O Lord, but not yet!" In Mr. Share’s view his wife and daughter had no business in the world; and indeed his finest pride was to maintain them in complete ignorance of the world. Even during the war he dissuaded Lilian from any war-work, holding that she could most meetly help the Empire to triumph by helping to solace her father in the terrific troubles of keeping a large art school alive under D.O.R.A. and the Conscription Act. Later, Mrs. Share was struck down by cancer on the liver and died after six months’ illness, which cost Mr. Share a considerable amount of money--lavishly squandered, cheerfully paid. Mr. Share was heart-broken; he really grew quite old in a fortnight; and his mute appeal to Lilian for moral succour and the balm of filial tenderness was irresistible. Lilian had lost a mother, but the main fact in the situation was that Mr. Share had lost a peerless wife. Lilian became housekeeper and the two settled down together. Mr. Share adored his daughter more than ever, and more visibly. Her freedom, always excessively limited, was now retrenched. She was transfixed eternally as the old man’s prop. Her twenty-first birthday passed, and not a word as to her future, as to a marriage for her, or as to her individuality, desires, hopes! She was papa’s cherished darling. Then Mr. Share caught pneumonia, through devotion to duty, and died in a few days; and at last Lilian felt on her lovely cheek the winds of the world; at last she was free. Of high paternal finance she had never in her life heard one word. In the week following the funeral she learnt that she would be mistress of the furniture and a little over one hundred pounds net. Mr. Share had illustrated the ancient maxim that it is easier to make money than to keep it. He had held shipping shares too long and had sold a fully paid endowment insurance policy in the vain endeavour to replace by adventurous investment that which the sea had swallowed up. And Lilian was helpless. She could do absolutely nothing that was worth money. She could not begin to earn a livelihood. As for relatives, there was only her father’s brother, a Board School teacher with a large vulgar family and an income far too small to permit of generosities. Lilian was first incredulous, then horror-struck.