"It costs more for two people to keep house than to board. Our furniture, rent, food, fuel, lights and servants would come to more than the eighteen dollars a week which we pay here, now that we have given up our parlor. In a civilized country elbow-room is expensive."
"But is it exactly nice to stay forever in a hotel? English travellers make such an outcry about American families living in hotels."
"I know. At the bottom it is bad. But it is a sad necessity of American society. So long as we have untrained servants--black barbarians at the South and mutinous foreigners at the North--many American housekeepers will throw down their keys in despair and rush for refuge to the hotels. And numbers produce respectability, at least in a democracy."
"So we must give up the idea of a nice little house all to ourselves."
"I am afraid so, unless I should happen to find diamonds in the basaltic formation of the Eagle's Nest."
The Doctor falls to his writing, and Miss Ravenel to her embroidery. Presently the young lady, without having anything in particular to say, is conscious of a desire for further conversation, and, after searching for a subject, begins as follows.
"Papa, have you been in the parlor this morning?"
"Yes, my dear," answers papa, scratching away desperately with his old-fashioned quill pen.
"See?--Where?--Oh, I saw Mr. Andrew Smith," says the Doctor, at first absent-minded, then looking a little quizzical.
"Why, my dear, he spoke so low that I couldn't hear what he said."
"He did!" responds Miss Ravenel, all interest. "What did that mean? Why didn't you ask him to repeat it?"
"Because, my dear, he wasn't talking to me; he was talking to Mrs. Smith."
Here Miss Ravenel perceives that her habitual curiosity is being made fun of, and replies, "Papa, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."
"My child, you _must_ give me some chance to write," retorts the Doctor; "or else you must learn to sit a little in your own room. Of course I prefer to have you here, but I do demand that you accord me some infinitesimal degree of consideration."
Father and daughter used to have many conversations not very dissimilar to the above. It was a constant prattle when they were together, unless the Doctor raised the standard of revolt and refused to talk in order that he might work. Ever since Lillie's earliest recollection they had been on these same terms of sociability, companionship, almost equality. The intimacy and democracy of the relation arose partly from the Doctor's extreme fondness for children and young people, and partly from the fact that he had lost his wife early, so that in his household life he had for years depended for sympathy upon his daughter.
