of branching out. She moved cautiously for a few days, then timidly
began to spend money.

There is a notion widely spread abroad that people who have little money
know more about the art of spending money and the science of economizing
than those who have much. It would be about as sensible to say that the
best swimmers are those who have never been near the water, or no nearer
than a bath tub. Anyone wishing to be convinced need only make an
excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage
barrels overflowing with spoiled food--or the trashy goods exposed for
sale in the shops and the markets. Those who have had money and have
lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift. Those who have
never had money are almost invariably prodigal--because they are
ignorant. When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family had had money.
But never since she could remember had they been anything but poor.

She did not know how to spend money. She did not know prices or
values--being in that respect precisely like the mass of mankind--and
womankind--who imagine they are economical because they hunt so-called
bargains and haggle with merchants who have got doubly ready for them by
laying in inferior goods and by putting up prices in advance. She knew
how much ten dollars a week was, the meaning of the twenty to thirty
dollars a week her father had made. But she had only a faint--and
exaggeratedly mistaken--notion about sixty-five hundred a year--six and
a half thousands. It seemed wealth to her, so vast that a hundred
thousand a year would have seemed no more. As soon as she drifted away
from the known course--the thirty to forty dollars a week upon which
they had been living--Dorothea Hallowell was in a trackless sea, with a
broken compass and no chart whatever. A common enough experience in
America, the land of sudden changes of fortune, of rosiest hopes about