To keep Ernest from thinking much about money matters, Miss Theodora had discouraged intimacies with her richer distant relatives--excepting only the Digbys. This one exception in the case of the Digbys needed no justification in her mind. Had not Stuart been John's best friend? Thus Ernest, growing up in the simple West End neighborhood, had little opportunity to make uncomfortable contrasts between his aunt's way of living and that of richer people. Had Ralph and Ernest been more congenial, Ernest might have been drawn into Ralph's set, made up of the boys of his own age with the largest claims on the so-called society of Boston. As it had been, Ralph and his friends formed a little world apart from Ernest and his interests. With Ben as full confidant and adviser, Ernest was naturally well content with his own lot. For Ben, with so much less than Ernest had of the things that money gives, was always happy--apparently happy and absorbed in his studies. Ernest knew of course that he himself must be economical,--his aunt had often said so; but sometimes he thought that this economy was only one of her fancies,--she was so unlike other people in many ways. Especially probable did this seem when she gave him a liberal allowance for Harvard. He did not know, until Richard Somerset told him, that a bank failure a few years before had taken five thousand dollars of Miss Theodora's small capital, and that a mortgage of almost the same amount had been put on the house to enable her to carry out her plans for Ernest. But Ernest's happy ignorance was now at an end. If his summer in Europe, his year in college, had done nothing else for him, these things had given him a desire for a larger life than he had had. Unless they take form in action desires of this kind may end in mere discontent, to eat into the heart of their possessor. Rightly directed, they will carry him along a path at the end of which, even if unsuccessful, he will at least have pleasure in remembering that he tried to reach a definite goal. Thus Ernest, disturbed by the fact that his college course was less satisfactory to him than he had expected it to be, confronted by the knowledge that money, or lack of money, plays a large part in every-day affairs, overwhelmed by his discovery of the meagreness of his aunt's possessions, still hesitated a little as to his own duty. [Illustration] XV.