"Oh! We may as well stay here--I don't mean that sort of retrenching--I mean in other ways. I'm not going to give expensive bridge parties or keep three motors and a saddle horse--I can't ride any more, anyway--and I'm not going to have a professional reader for papa. Aunt Belle, you, and I can manage that--that will take fifteen dollars a week from the expenses. Besides, I am going to have three-course dinners from now on--no game, fish, or extra sweet. That will make a difference--in time. I shall not buy the new dinner set I had halfway ordered--it was wonderful, of course, but I have no right to use money for nonsense. Papa can give it to me for my birthday if he wants to. Gifts don't count, do they, Stevuns? "Then there is the servant question. Now cook is seventy-five dollars a month; the three maids are fifty each, besides all they steal and waste; the laundress and her helper, the chauffeur and all the garden men; the food, light, heat--to say nothing of extra expenses; my parties and trips and the enormous bills for taxes and upkeep that papa pays--I'm afraid to say how much it comes to each month. But it is going to stop! Then my clothes--I'm just ashamed to think--while you, poor dear, exist on nothing----Oh, thank you, Elsie." A maid had brought in a supper tray. "I didn't want to come downstairs, so I sent for some lunch." She watched Steve's amused expression. "Aunt Belle gets on my nerves and unless we are having people in, the room is too big to have a family meal." On the tray was a dish heaped with tartlettes aux fruits, cornets a la creme, babas au rhum, petits fours, madeleines, and Napoleons. There was another dish filled with marrons glaces and malaga grapes preserved in sugar. A few faint wedges of bread and butter pointed the way to the pot of iced chocolate and the pitcher of whipped cream. "Well," Steve ventured, looking at the tray, "I'm afraid I don't agree----" "I know your ideas. You think I ought to be frying chops for you and giving praise because I have a nineteen-dollar near-taffeta dress. I can just see you walking round a two-by-four back yard measuring the corn and putting the watermelons into eiderdown sleeping bags so they won't freeze; then telling everyone at the shop what an ideal home life you lead! No, deary, I'm retrenching because it's a novelty, and you would like to retrench----" "Because I may be forced to do so. I hate to worry you--I never mean to unless there is no other way out--but I must warn you that the abnormal war conditions are no longer inflating business and everyone is watching his step. I cannot take your father's place; he carved it out step by step. I fairly aeroplaned to the top and found that while I was sitting there in fancied security other people were busy chopping down the steps and I should find myself having a great old fall down to earth. Now----"