To be sure, he had just told her that she was a brick about money, but that had been intended as a warning to virtue rather than as an encouragement to weakness.

There was, to be sure, a vague understanding that she might make bills when they were unavoidable; but so in want of spending money had she been since her marriage, that several times she had been obliged to borrow car fare from her mother-in-law.

When she had asked George for an allowance, however small, he had put her off with the permission to charge whatever she bought in the shops.

As the bills apparently never lessened, and her conscience revolted from debt, she had gone without things she needed rather than accept the barren generosity of his promises.

At Christmas her father-in-law had given her fifty dollars in gold, and with this she had bought presents for her mother and Jane and the servants.
In the old days in Hill Street she had had little enough, but at least that little had really belonged to her; and since her marriage she had learned that when one is poor, it is better to live surrounded by want.
To be poor in the midst of wealth--to be obliged to support a fictitious affluence on one's secret poverty--this was after all to know the supreme mortification of spirit.