"That sounds very well. But it isn't practical. If you want to do big work, you have to be your own master, and not work for some one else! And art, especially architecture, lives on the luxury of the rich, whom you seem to despise!" "What does it matter whose name goes on the plans? It's the work that makes it that counts, and no one can have that but the one who does it." "Now, you're talking poetry, Nell, not sense!" he exclaimed good-naturedly, getting up from the lounge and walking to and fro. "This world doesn't run on those lines, and you and I aren't going to make it over, either. You're talking like a romantic girl!" "There isn't much else of the girl left in me!" she smiled wistfully back to him. "Just look at it practically. If I go out of business for myself, I couldn't earn more than two hundred a month working for some firm. That's as much as Wright ever pays his best men. What would that be to live on? For you and me and the boys?" "We could make it do. There are many others who have less." "Next you will want to take in washing." "I had rather do the cooking, when it comes to that," she flashed back. "I can see us in a four-room flat somewhere south on one of those God-forsaken prairie streets. One slovenly maid, and the food! A cigar on Sundays and holidays! You would buy your clothes over the counter at Letterson's and go bargain-hunting for your weekly amusement. No, thank you! I am not quite so far gone yet as that, my dear. You don't realize the facts." His mind was not open to her conception, even in its simplest application. To him a small income with its manner of life meant merely degradation. She saw, as never before, how Chicago had moulded him and had left his nature set in a hard crust of prejudice. The great industrial city where he had learned the lesson of life throttled the finer aspirations of men like a remorseless giant, converting its youth into iron-clawed beasts of prey, answering to the one hoarse cry, "Success, Success, Success!" "And how should we educate the boys? Think of it! How could we give them as good a start in life as we had? Why, it would be criminal to them. It's nonsense!" "I have thought of them," she replied calmly. "And I am willing to take the risks for them, too. I am willing to see them start in life poor, with just what we could do for them. Perhaps in the world to which they will grow up, things will be different, anyway." He had tested her in the tenderest point, and she was stanch. He began to see how far this theory of living and working in the world went with her. She was ready to put herself outside her own class, and her children also, for the sake of an idea, a feeling that she had about man's true purpose in life.