Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady's drawing-room.

In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.
"I'm afraid I'm detaining you," he said.

The visit had been a failure.
"Oh, not at all," she replied, and then added in a tone of more sincerity: "I do have the most terrible time with my check-book.

And," she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, "I was trying to balance it." "You should not be troubled with such things," said Mr.Lanley, thinking how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.
Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother's checks, but of late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn.

"I don't see how I can be," she said, too hopeless to deny it.
"If you would allow me," said Mr.Lanley.