"No, Phil. We are not rich--far from it. It's hardly possible for a lawyer to grow rich in a town like this. But I haven't been doing as well as I could lately. I've got to do better and I must be about it." He drew himself up in his chair and glanced at his watch. It had stopped, and as the court-house clock boomed eight he set it. It was quite like him to allow his watch to run down. "I was in your office yesterday, daddy, and I hope you won't mind, but I was straightening your desk and I couldn't help seeing some old bills. Several of them had been there a long time. My graduating dress hasn't been paid for--and some things like that. We must economize until those bills are paid. And I was thinking that you ought to get more money out of the building. Rents are going up on Main Street. I heard Paul Fosdick say so. You ought to raise the clothing store rent right away. I don't know of any easier way of getting money," she added drolly, "than by wringing it from the tenants." She laughed, to make it easier for him. "Yes; that's one way of doing it; only Bernstein had a long lease that expires--I'm not sure when it does expire--" he concluded, and the color deepened in his dark cheeks. It was his business to know when the lease on the property expired, and as though reminded by this lapse of similar failures in other directions, he drew out his watch again and made sure that he had wound it. "It expires," said Phil, "on the last day of this next December. I looked it up yesterday afternoon in that little memorandum book you keep in your desk." "I guess that's right. I'm glad you mentioned it. I'll see Bernstein right away and ask him if he wants to renew the lease. I suppose I ought to coax a higher rent out of him, but he's been there a long time." "Oh, he'll stand another fifty and be glad of it. His sign is on all the fences in the country--'Bernstein's--The Same Old Place.' It would cost him some money to change that. And you could cheer him up by painting the front of the building. The interurban is bringing a lot more business to Montgomery. I've been thinking we ought to do something about that third floor room where the photograph shop used to be. Bernstein has an upstairs room in the next building where his tailor imparts that final deft touch that adjusts ready-made garments to the most difficult figure. It would be handier for him to conduct the sartorial transformations in the chamber over his own gate, wouldn't it? And I don't think we need wait for that photographer to come back from the penitentiary or wherever he languisheth." She was minimizing the significance of these suggestions--a significance that lay, she knew, in the fact of their coming from her--by lapsing into the absurdities with which she embellished her familiar talk. She pronounced "languisheth" with a prolongation of the last syllable that gave to it a characteristic touch of mockery.