She had broached the matter as delicately as possible. It had been in her mind that she must speak to her father about their affairs, but she had not thought the opportunity would offer so quickly. It was hard to say to him that she had undertaken to manage the housekeeping as an economical measure; that she knew he owed money that he had no immediate prospect of paying. The hurt look that she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking. When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they had established in her a belief that her mother was a bad woman: the facts spoke for themselves. And having had a bad mother it was incumbent upon Phil to choose her path with a particular care and to walk in it circumspectly. Phil had, by this time, considered the case from the changing viewpoints natural to the young mind. In that rosy light through which a girl of fifteen is apt to view life,--the first realizations of sex, the age of the first novels,--Phil had not been free from the contemplation of her mother as a romantic figure. For a woman to forsake a husband for a lover was not without precedents. Phil had dreamed over this a good deal, in an impersonal sort of way, and the unknown mother had been glorified in scenes of renunciation, following nobly the high call of a greater love. By a swift transition her father assumed the sympathetic role in the domestic drama. She chanced upon novels in which the spurned husband was exalted to the shame of the dishonorable wife. Her father fitted well into this picture. She even added herself to the _dramatis personae_, not without a sense of her value in the scene. But these were only passing phases. There was no morbid strain in Phil. Her father was the best of companions, and she was quick to recognize his fineness and gentleness and to appreciate his cultivation with its background of solid learning. Phil's question startled her father. Money had never been discussed in the household, and this new gravity in his daughter's eyes troubled him. Phil's needs had been few; her demands had burdened him little. Her aunts had bought her clothes and sent him the bills. When he gave her money to spend, he never asked for an accounting, though he was often amused by the uses to which she put it; and sometimes he had been touched by her gifts at Christmas or on his birthdays, which ranged from a reckless investment in gay neckties to a set of some author whose definitive edition he had coveted--Shelley or Landor or Matthew Arnold. No; money was not a subject that had interested Phil, and her father found her direct question disconcerting.