Then one night it dawned on me. Hers was the same heart hunger that had been eating at me. Dick was a boy now and there was no baby to take his place. But, good Lord, as it was I hadn't been able to save a dollar. I knew that we were simply holding on tight and drifting. The boat was loaded to the gunwales even now. And yet that expression in her eyes had a right to be answered. But I couldn't answer it. I didn't dare open my mouth. I didn't dare speak even one night when she said, "He's all we have, Billy--just one." I gripped her hand and sat staring into the little coal hod fireplace which we didn't light more than once a month now. Even as I watched the flames I saw them licking up pennies. Just one! And I too wanted a houseful like Dick. I had to see that look night after night and I had to go to town knowing I was leaving her all alone with the one away at school. And what a mother she was! She ought to have had a baby by her side all the time. As the one grew, his expenses increased. The only way to meet them was by cutting down our own expenses still more. I cut out smoking and made my old clothes do an extra year. Ruth spent half her time in bargain hunting and saved still more by taking it out of herself. Poor little woman, she worked harder for a quarter than I did and I was working harder for that sum than I used to work for a dollar. But we were not alone in the struggle. As we came to know more about the people in that group of snug little houses we knew that the same grim fight was going on in all of them. Some of them were not so lucky as we and ran into debt while a few of them were luckier and were helped out with legacies or by well-to-do relatives. We were as much alike as peas in a pod. We were living on the future and bluffing out the present. You'd have thought it would have cast a gloom over the neighborhood--you'd have thought it would have done away with some of the parties and dances. But it didn't. In the first place this was, to most of us, just life. In the second place there didn't seem to be any alternative. There was no other way of living. The conditions seemed to be fixed; we had to eat, we had to wear a certain type of dress; and unless we wished to exist as exiles we had to meet on a certain plane of social intercourse. The conventions were as iron clad here as among the nobility of England. No one thought of violating them; no one thought it was possible. You had to live as the others did or die and be done with it. If anyone of us had thought we might have seen the foolishness of this but it was all so manifest that no one did think. The only method of escape was a raise and that meant moving into another sphere which would cover that.