"striking it rich," of carelessness and ignorance as to values, of eager
and untrained appetite for luxury and novelty of any and every kind.

At first any expenditure, however small, for the plainest comfort which
had been beyond their means seemed a giddy extravagance. But a bank
account--_and_ a check book--soon dissipated that nervousness. A few
charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing
a check, and she was almost at her ease. With people who have known only
squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation
and slow accumulation, the spreading out process is usually slow--not so
slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of
tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid. A
piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into
acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check.
With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to
them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading is a tropical,
overnight affair.

Counting all she spent and arranged to spend in those first few weeks,
you had no great total. But it was great for a girl who had been making
ten dollars a week. Also there were sown in her mind broadcast and thick
the seeds of desire for more luxurious comfort, of need for it, that
could never be uprooted.

Norman came over almost every evening. He got a new and youthful and
youth-restoring kind of pleasure out of this process of expansion. He
liked to hear each trifling detail, and he was always making suggestions
that bore immediate fruit in further expenditure. When he again brought
up the subject of a larger house, she listened with only the faintest
protests. Her ideas of such a short time before seemed small, laughably