As supper went on, it was little Gladys who brought up the question which some one older might have asked.
"What would happen, daddy, if you couldn't pay the interest and the taxes?"
"They could sell us out of house and home."
But this possibility being more than a week off, the statement brought no fears with it. Like all people who at the best of times are dependent on a weekly wage, the Folletts had the mental attitude best described as "from hand to mouth." That is, once the dinner was secure, there was no will to worry as to where the supper was to come from. It was fundamentally a question of outlook. People used to being provided for naturally looked ahead; but where your most extended view could take you no more than from one meal to another your powers of forecast grew limited. Doubtless the provision was merciful, for, in the case of the Folletts, even the parents felt the futility of dreading a calamity more than a week away.
Of all the six, Jennie was the only one with a power of making comparisons and drawing contrasts. She had had, that day, a glimpse of a world as different from her own as paradise from earth. It was no use saying that it was different only in degree; it was different also in kind. It was different in values, in textures, in amplitudes. It was another thing, not another aspect of the same thing. Junia Collingham might be a human being like herself; but in all that was of practical account, she was as widely separated from Jennie Follett as a New Yorker from a Central African.
That was as far as Jennie got. Her mind was not given to deduction or her spirit to asking questions. Not having a God in particular, she had nothing to act as a great touchstone, to praise or to blame. Some human beings had everything; others had next to nothing. The Folletts were among "the others." Jennie didn't know how or why. She didn't ask to know. Knowing would perhaps be worse than not knowing, since it might stir rebellion where there was now only lassitude and resignation. But there was the fact. The Collinghams could throw her twenty-five thousand dollars as she threw a titbit to Pansy, while her father might be sold out of house and home for lack of a hundred and fifty.
Jennie mused, but she did no more. Life was too big a mystery to grapple with. If she tried it, it made her unhappy. It made her unhappy that Max should have been friendly at first, and then growled at her so resentfully. She wondered if dogs had a scent for moral and emotional atmospheres. She couldn't express this last in words, but she did it very well by thought. She often had thoughts for which she had no words, so that her inner life was broader than that which she showed outside. It was one of the things she had noticed about Mrs. Collingham—that she had words for everything. It was like her possession of the house, the gardens, the beautiful things. They gave her spaciousness. Her spirit moved with a larger swing. She could think, feel, express herself strongly, vividly, commandingly, while they, the Folletts, had to creep and sneak timidly along the back lanes of life.
"That's why I'm doing it," she reasoned with herself, "because I'm in the back lanes of life. I can creep and sneak along, and I can't do anything else. It was all very well for him to jostle me with his lean, iron flank and to growl; but he didn't know what twenty-five thousand would mean to me."
Along the line of these musings, Teddy said, suddenly:
"Saw young Coll to-day. Came up and spoke to me. Not half a bad sort when you get to know him."