"I was born here," Jay reminded her.
Lida nodded. "Yes; that's my trouble. If you were an Englishman, now—if you'd generations and centuries behind you when you'd never been anything but a gentleman—you'd have the confidence and pride in yourself to use your wife's money. You'd not only use it; you'd demand it. Imagine an Englishman marrying me without seeing to a big settlement on himself first."
"Hmhm," said Jay. "You'd have respected me for that?"
"It would show you respected yourself."
"You'd have liked an Englishman like that," he said, not putting it as a question, but a statement of realization. "Well, the English certainly get away with it."
"Because they know what's in them."
"What's in me, unless I show something by working?"
"Chicago," said Lida, hopelessly. "Go down and see what the Mettens gave you; and what your father'll give you for it."
Jay went to breakfast, upon this morning, not in the hotel dining-room at a dollar-fifty for cereal, egg and coffee, but in a cafeteria a few blocks away in the company of clerks and stenographers where he saved a subtraction of a dollar and fifteen cents.
How it would amuse Lida's bright, black eyes to witness this bit of economy! It would not amuse at all the steady, gray eyes of the girl to whom he was going and who had suggested to him, so gently, that he "grow up." By going into business, she meant, by taking another at' titude, than his own, toward business. What was his own attitude? Not Lida's surely.
