Phil had, by this time, considered the case from the changing viewpoints natural to the young mind. In that rosy light through which a girl of fifteen is apt to view life,—the first realizations of sex, the age of the first novels,—Phil had not been free from the contemplation of her mother as a romantic figure. For a woman to forsake a husband for a lover was not without precedents. Phil had dreamed over this a good deal, in an impersonal sort of way, and the unknown mother had been glorified in scenes of renunciation, following nobly the high call of a greater love. By a swift transition her father assumed the sympathetic rôle in the domestic drama. She chanced upon novels in which the spurned husband was exalted to the shame of the dishonorable wife. Her father fitted well into this picture. She even added herself to the dramatis personæ, not without a sense of her value in the scene. But these were only passing phases. There was no morbid strain in Phil. Her father was the best of companions, and she was quick to recognize his fineness and gentleness and to appreciate his cultivation with its background of solid learning.
Phil's question startled her father. Money had never been discussed in the household, and this new gravity in his daughter's eyes troubled him. Phil's needs had been few; her demands had burdened him little. Her aunts had bought her clothes and sent him the bills. When he gave her money to spend, he never asked for an accounting, though he was often amused by the uses to which she put it; and sometimes he had been touched by her gifts at Christmas or on his birthdays, which ranged from a reckless investment in gay neckties to a set of some author whose definitive edition he had coveted—Shelley or Landor or Matthew Arnold. No; money was not a subject that had interested Phil, and her father found her direct question disconcerting.
"No, Phil. We are not rich—far from it. It's hardly possible for a lawyer to grow rich in a town like this. But I haven't been doing as well as I could lately. I've got to do better and I must be about it."
He drew himself up in his chair and glanced at his watch. It had stopped, and as the court-house clock boomed eight he set it. It was quite like him to allow his watch to run down.
"I was in your office yesterday, daddy, and I hope you won't mind, but I was straightening your desk and I couldn't help seeing some old bills. Several of them had been there a long time. My graduating dress hasn't been paid for—and some things like that. We must economize until those bills are paid. And I was thinking that you ought to get more money out of the building. Rents are going up on Main Street. I heard Paul Fosdick say so. You ought to raise the clothing store rent right away. I don't know of any easier way of getting money," she added drolly, "than by wringing it from the tenants."
She laughed, to make it easier for him.
"Yes; that's one way of doing it; only Bernstein had a long lease that expires—I'm not sure when it does expire—" he concluded, and the color deepened in his dark cheeks. It was his business to know when the lease on the property expired, and as though reminded by this lapse of similar failures in other directions, he drew out his watch again and made sure that he had wound it.
"It expires," said Phil, "on the last day of this next December. I looked it up yesterday afternoon in that little memorandum book you keep in your desk."
"I guess that's right. I'm glad you mentioned it. I'll see Bernstein right away and ask him if he wants to renew the lease. I suppose I ought to coax a higher rent out of him, but he's been there a long time."
"Oh, he'll stand another fifty and be glad of it. His sign is on all the fences in the country—'Bernstein's—The Same Old Place.' It would cost him some money to change that. And you could cheer him up by painting the front of the building. The interurban is bringing a lot more business to Montgomery. I've been thinking we ought to do something about that third floor room where the photograph shop used to be. Bernstein has an upstairs room in the next building where his tailor imparts that final deft touch that adjusts ready-made garments to the most difficult figure. It would be handier for him to conduct the sartorial transformations in the chamber over his own gate, wouldn't it? And I don't think we need wait for that photographer to come back from the penitentiary or wherever he languisheth."