He
had risen, place by place, to a position that gave him a hundred
and fifty dollars a month, and one so responsible that his death
or absence would have dislocated the office for half a day.
"A first-class man and an authority on pro ratas!"
Such might have been the inscription on George Raymond's tomb!
His mother was still alive. She had never entirely regained her
health or her strength, and it took all the little she had of
either to do the necessary housekeeping for herself and her son.
Thin to emaciation, sharp-tongued, a tyrant to her finger-tips,
her indomitable spirit remained as uncowed as ever and she ruled
her son with a rod of iron. To her, Georgie, as she always called
him, was still a child. As far as she was concerned he had never
grown up. She took his month's salary, told him when to buy new
shirts, ordered his clothes herself, doled out warningly the few
dollars for his necessaries, and saved, saved, continually saved.
The old woman dreaded poverty with a horror not to be expressed in
words. It had ruined her own life; it had crushed her son under
its merciless wheels; in the words of the proverb, she was the
coward who died a thousand deaths in the agonies of apprehension.
She was one of those not uncommon misers, who hoard, not for love
of money, but through fear. She had managed, with penurious thrift
and a self-denial almost sublime in its austerity, to set aside
eight thousand dollars. Eight thousand dollars from an income that
began at sixty and rose to a little under three times that amount!
Eight thousand dollars, wrung from their lives at the price of
every joy, every alleviation, everything that could make the world
barely tolerable.
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