She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was round but worn, and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humor which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families. Her pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph’s, save in expression, for whereas he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of view. This made her appear his elder by more years than existed in fact between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook. She then said, without any preface:
“It’s about Charles and Uncle John’s offer…. Mother’s been talking to me. She says she can’t afford to pay for him after this term. She says she’ll have to ask for an overdraft as it is.”
“That’s simply not true,” said Ralph.
“No. I thought not. But she won’t believe me when I say it.”
Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument, drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself.
“I’m not interrupting?” she inquired.
Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved themselves in semicircles above their eyes.
“She doesn’t understand that one’s got to take risks,” he observed, finally.
“I believe mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the sort of boy to profit by it.”
“He’s got brains, hasn’t he?” said Ralph. His tone had taken on that shade of pugnacity which suggested to his sister that some personal grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it might be, but at once recalled her mind, and assented.
“In some ways he’s fearfully backward, though, compared with what you were at his age. And he’s difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave for him.”
Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother’s perverse moods, and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her “she,” which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation:
“It’s pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!”
“Nobody wants to stick him into an office,” she said.
She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged, rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out somewhere, she didn’t know and didn’t mean to ask where, all the afternoon.
Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.
“The truth is,” he observed gloomily, “that I ought to have accepted Uncle John’s offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by this time.”
“I don’t think that for a moment,” Joan replied quickly, repenting of her annoyance. “The question, to my mind, is, whether we couldn’t cut down our expenses in some way.”
“A smaller house?”
“Fewer servants, perhaps.”
Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly:
“It’s out of the question.”
It was out of the question that she should put any more household work upon herself. No, the hardship must fall on him, for he was determined that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing themselves as other families had—as the Hilberys had, for example. He believed secretly and rather defiantly, for it was a fact not capable of proof, that there was something very remarkable about his family.
“If mother won’t run risks—”
“You really can’t expect her to sell out again.”
“She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won’t, we must find some other way, that’s all.”
A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without asking, what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps, three or four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes, sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of losing every penny of it in a day’s disaster. But although she wondered, she could not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly. Ralph interested her more than any one else in the world, and she often broke off in the middle of one of these economic discussions, in spite of their gravity, to consider some fresh aspect of his character.
“I think you’d be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,” she observed. “Fond as I am of him, he doesn’t seem to me exactly brilliant…. Besides, why should you be sacrificed?”
“My dear Joan,” Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture of impatience, “don’t you see that we’ve all got to be sacrificed? What’s the use of denying it? What’s the use of struggling against it? So it always has been, so it always will be. We’ve got no money and we never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do, when one comes to think of it.”
Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them again. Then she said, very tentatively:
“Aren’t you happy, Ralph?”
“No. Are you? Perhaps I’m as happy as most people, though. God knows whether I’m happy or not. What is happiness?”
He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at his sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.
“Happiness,” she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a considerable space, as if she were considering happiness in all its bearings. “Hilda was here to-day,” she suddenly resumed, as if they had never mentioned happiness. “She brought Bobbie—he’s a fine boy now.” Ralph observed, with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in it, that she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous approach to intimacy on to topics of general and family interest. Nevertheless, he reflected, she was the only one of his family with whom he found it possible to discuss happiness, although he might very well have discussed happiness with Miss Hilbery at their first meeting. He looked critically at Joan, and wished that she did not look so provincial or suburban in her high green dress with the faded trimming, so patient, and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell her about the Hilberys in order to abuse them, for in the miniature battle which so often rages between two quickly following impressions of life, the life of the Hilberys was getting the better of the life of the Denhams in his mind, and he wanted to assure himself that there was some quality in which Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hilbery. He should have felt that his own sister was more original, and had greater vitality than Miss Hilbery had; but his main impression of Katharine now was of a person of great vitality and composure; and at the moment he could not perceive what poor dear Joan had gained from the fact that she was the granddaughter of a man who kept a shop, and herself earned her own living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness of their life oppressed him in spite of his fundamental belief that, as a family, they were somehow remarkable.
“Shall you talk to mother?” Joan inquired. “Because, you see, the thing’s got to be settled, one way or another. Charles