All that he responded now to Stephen's outburst was, "Has anybody offered to buy them ?" "Why, what in the world!" exclaimed Mrs.Culpeper, who was neither reticent nor subdued.

From the depths of the mirror her bright brown eyes gazed back at her husband, while she fastened a cameo pin, containing the head of Minerva framed in pearls, in the rose-point on her bosom.
"To buy them ?" repeated Stephen.

"Why, they are horrors, Father, to live in--crumbling, insanitary horrors! And yet the rent has been doubled in the last two or three years." From the mirror his mother's face looked back at him, so small and clear and delicately tinted that it seemed to him merely an exaggerated copy of the cameo on her bosom, "I hope that means we shall have a little more to live on next year," she said reflectively, while the expression that Mary Byrd impertinently called her "economic look" appeared in her eyes.

"What with the high cost of everything, and the low interest on Liberty Bonds, and the innumerable relief organizations to which one is simply forced to contribute, it has been almost impossible to make two ends meet.

Poor Mary Byrd hasn't been able to give a single party this winter." Before Stephen's gaze there passed a vision of the dingy basement room, the embittered face of the woman, the sickly tow-headed children, the man who could not lift his eyes from the hole in the carpet, and the baby with that look of having been born not young, but old, the look of pre-natal experience and disillusionment.