Mrs. Denton laughed, and Ray sat looking at her with a curious mixture of liking and misgiving: he would have liked to laugh with her from the poet in him, but his civic man could not approve of her irresponsibility. In her quality of married woman, she was more reprehensible than she would have been as a girl; as a girl, she might well have been merely funny. Still, she was a woman, and her voice, if it expressed an irresponsible nature, was sweet to hear. She seemed not to dislike hearing it herself, and she let it run lightly on. “The hardest thing for us, though, has been getting used to money, and the care of it. It seems to be just as bad with a little as a great deal--the care does; and you have to be thinking about it all the time; we never had to think of it at all in the Family. Most of us never saw it, or touched it; only the few that went out and sold and bought things.” “That’s very odd,” said Ray, trying the notion if it would not work somewhere into literature; at the same time he felt the charm of this pretty young woman, and wondered why her sister did not come back. He heard her talking with Kane in the other room; now and then her voice, gentle and clear and somewhat high, was lost in Kane’s laugh, or the hoarse plunge of her father’s bass. “Yes,” Mrs. Denton went on, “I think I feel it more than my husband or my sister does; they just have to earn the money, but I have to take care of it, and see how far I can make it go. It’s perfectly distracting; and sometimes when I forget, and do something careless!” She let an impressive silence follow, and Ray laughed. “Yes, that’s an anxious time for us, even if we’re brought up with the advantages of worldly experience.”