[Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow]@TWC D-Link book
Life and Gabriella

CHAPTER I
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Life has been a seesaw with prosperity at one end of the plank and poverty at the other.

Of course I know," she pursued, with characteristic lucidity, "that you think me dreadfully extravagant, but we'd just as well spend it as lose it, and it's sure to be one thing or the other." "But couldn't you save something?
Couldn't you put by something for the future ?" Saving for the future was one of the habits of Gabriella's frugal past which still clung to her.
"That would go, too.

If we ever come to ruin--and heaven knows we've been on the brink of it before this--Archibald would not keep back a penny.

That's his way, and that's one of the reasons I spend all we have--up to the very margin of his income." The logic of this was so confusing that Gabriella was obliged to stop and puzzle it out.

At the end she could only admit that Mrs.Fowler's reasoning processes, which were by nature singularly lucid and exact, showed at times a remarkable subtlety--as if some extraneous hybrid faculty had been grafted on the simple parent stock of her mind.
"I can't help feeling, though," resumed the practical little lady before Gabriella had reached the end of her analysis, "that I'd be a great deal happier at this minute if we'd been poor all our lives." "It wouldn't have suited George," observed George's wife with an inflection of irony.
"He mightn't have liked it, but I believe it would have been a great deal better for him," replied Mrs.Fowler, while she bowed gravely to a woman in a passing victoria.


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