Ten minutes later Mrs. March, in a plain walking dress, with a thin black veil over her face, went out of her own door, and when she was well around the corner called a cab and gave the address of a plain hotel in the lower part of the city. As she leaned back in the ramshackle cab she drew her veil still more closely over her face and tried to collect her thoughts for the interview which she sought, but her mind wandered to all manner of subjects. How strange it was that she, the wife of one of the richest men in the Senate, with an allowance which was a fortune in itself, should be at that moment harassed for money! She never remembered the time in her life that such had not been the case. When she married Senator March it was with the expectation that never again as long as she lived would she ever want for money, but within the year the old emptiness of purse returned. Money slipped through her fingers she knew not how. She loved pearls and diamonds and beautiful things with an insatiable love. Senator March had loaded her with jewels, but she wanted more. It seemed to her that wealth was not wealth if one had to consider how it was spent. That principle had caused her to spend not only a splendid income, but had piled up debts to which her old burdens were a mere nothing. The same principle of shame and even fear that she had felt toward her father prevented her from opening her heart to her husband, the soul of indulgence. There was a kind of rigid morality about Roger March, and the idea that she had made debts which she concealed from him she knew would appear as a crime in his eyes. He would, of course, pay them--of that she felt quite certain--but in spite of her husband’s love and gentleness, he had always inspired her with a certain fear, just as her father did, and General Talbott would know the whole story which she so shrank from telling. She found a curious lack of power in herself to stop spending money. Then came Nicholas Colegrove’s opportunity.