QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS By the first of January it became plain that there was not very much left of Colonel Mallett's fortune, less of his business reputation, and even less of his wife's health.

But she was now able to travel, and toward the middle of the month she sailed with Naida and one maid for Naples, leaving her son to gather up and straighten out what little of value still remained in the wreckage of the house of Mallett.

What he cared most about was to straighten out his father's personal reputation; and this was possible only as far as it concerned Colonel Mallett's individual honesty.

But the rehabilitation was accomplished at the expense of his father's reputation for business intelligence; and New York never really excuses such things.
Not much remained after the amounts due every creditor had been checked up and provided for; and it took practically all Duane had, almost all Naida had, and also the sacrifice of the town house and country villa to properly protect those who had suffered.

Part of his mother's estate remained intact, enough to permit her and her daughter to live by practising those inconsequential economies, the necessity for which fills Europe with about the only sort of Americans cultivated foreigners can tolerate, and for which predatory Europeans have no use whatever.
As for Duane, matters were now in such shape that he found it possible to rent a studio with adjoining bath and bedroom--an installation which, at one time, was more than he expected to be able to afford.
The loss of that luxury, which custom had made a necessity, filled his daily life full of trifling annoyances and surprises which were often unpleasant and sometimes humorous; but the new and arid order of things kept him so busy that he had little time for the apathy, bitterness, or self-commiseration which, in linked sequence, usually follow sudden disaster.
Sooner or later it was inevitable that he must feel more keenly the death of a father who, until in the shadow of impending disaster, had never offered him a very close intimacy.