my always empty purse when we went shopping; or mine would drop a
gold piece into my top bureau drawer for me to find after she had
gone. And there were always checks for birthdays.

Everything went into running expenses; yet, in spite of it, our
expenses ran quite away. Max said I was "too valuable a woman to put
into the kitchen," so we hired a maid, good-humoredly giving her
_carte blanche_ on the grocery and meat market. Our bills, for all
our dining out, were enormous. There were clothes, too. Max
delighted in silk socks and tailored shirts, and he ordered his
monogramed cigarettes by the thousand. My own taste ran to expensive
little hats.

It is hardly necessary to recount the details. We had our first
tremendous quarrel at the end of six months, when, in spite of our
furniture money and our birthday checks, we found ourselves two
hundred and fifty dollars in debt. But as we cooled we decided that
there was nothing we could do without; we could only be "more
careful."

Every month we reached that same conclusion. There was nothing we
could do without. At the end of the year on a $1200 salary we were
$700 behind; eight months later, after our first baby came, we were
over a thousand--and by that time, it seemed, permanently estranged.
I actually was carrying out a threat of separation and stripping the
apartment, one morning, when Max came back from town and sat down to
discuss matters with me.

A curious labyrinthine discussion it was, winding from
recriminations and flat admissions that our marriage was a failure