“I’ve protested,” she said. “I’ve threatened to take steps. Pooh! What can I do? They pay no more attention to me than _that_! Neither father nor gram’ma. Mother is neutral. Father says it will make me rich. I don’t want to be rich. Besides he has said that before.” “It may turn out well,” I said. “It isn’t as if this were the first time,” she continued. “Twice he has had us on the rocks. Twice he has lost all our money, all that he could get his hands on, in the same way, putting it into a railroad that he hoped to get control of or something, and going smash at the end. Once when I was a little girl and again three years ago. To-day on the train I heard two men talking about a receivership for the Great Midwestern as if it were inevitable. What would that mean?” “It would be very disagreeable,” I said. “That’s almost the same as bankruptcy, isn’t it?” “It is bankruptcy,” I said; but I added that rumors just then were very wild in Wall Street and so false in general that the worse they were the less they were heeded, people reacting to them in a disbelieving, contrary manner. She shook her head doubtfully. “Are you going to tell me what Mr. Valentine’s opinion is?” “He would not recommend anyone to buy the stock just now,” I said. “He makes no secret of seeing darkly.” “The rocks again,” she said. “And no more legacies to save us. Nearly all of our rich relatives are already dead.” The realism of youth! I could not resist the opportunity to ask one question. “I can understand your case,” I said, “but the others,--your mother and grandmother,--they are not helpless. Why do they hand over their money for these adventures in high finance? Or perhaps they believe in your father’s star.” “No more than I believe in it,” she replied. “No. It isn’t that. They can’t help it.” She looked at me from afar, through a haze of recollections, and repeated the thought to herself, wondering: “They cannot help it. We cannot say no. Even I cannot say it. What he wants he gets.” She shivered. “Will you walk back with me, please.” It was still raining. We walked all the way back in silence. At the step she reached for her umbrella, said thank you and stepped inside. The door closed with a slam. That could have been the draught again, provided the inner door stood open, which seemed very improbable. What left me furious, gave me once more that hot, humiliated feeling which resulted from our first encounter on the ferryboat, was the same thing again. She had spoken my name, she had solicited a favor, she had employed blandishments, she had exposed the family’s closet of horrors, and all the time I might have been a person in a play, a non-existent giraffe or one of Cleopatra’s eunuchs. CHAPTER IV AN ECONOMIC NIGHTMARE i