“Who?  Me?” Vic launched himself in among them and slid spinelessly into his chair as only a lanky boy can slide.  “Happy thought!  Only I’ll have bottle green for mine.  A fellow stepped on my roof this afternoon, so—­”

“You’ll wear a cap then—­or go bareheaded and claim it’s to make your hair grow.”  Helen May regarded him coldly.  “Lots of fellows do.  You don’t get a single new dud before the fourth, Vic Stevenson.”

“Oh, don’t I?” Vic drawled with much sarcasm, and pulled two dollars from his trousers pocket, displaying them with lofty triumph.  “I get a new hat to-morrow, Miss Stingy.”

“Vic, where did you get that money?” Helen May’s eyes flamed to the battle.  “Have you been staying out of school and hanging around those picture studios?”

“Yup—­at two dollars per hang,” Vic mouthed, spearing a stuffed green pepper dexterously.  “Fifty rehearsals for two one-minute scenes of honorable college gangs honorably hailing the hee-ro.  Waugh!  Where’d you get these things—­or did the cat bring it in?  Stuffed with laundry soap, if you ask me.  Why don’t you try that new place on Spring?”

“Vic Stevenson!” Helen May began in true sisterly disapprobation.  “Is that getting you anywhere in your studies?  A few more days out of school, and—­”

Peter’s thoughts turned inward.  He did not even hear the half playful, half angry dispute between these two.  Vic was a heady youth, much given to rebelling against the authority of Helen May who bullied or wheedled as her mood and the emergency might impel, as sisters do the world over.  Peter was thinking of his two hundred dollars saved against disaster; and a third of that to go for life insurance on the tenth, which was just one row down on the calendar; and Helen May going the way her mother had gone—­unless she lived out of doors “like an Indian” in Arizona or—­Peter’s mind refused to name again the remote, inaccessible places where Helen May might evade the penalty of being the child of her mother and of poverty.

Gray hat for Peter or bottle-green hat for Vic—­what did it matter if neither of them ever again owned a hat, if Helen May must stay here in the city and face the doom that had been pronounced upon her?  What did anything matter, if Babe died and left him plodding along alone?  Vic did not occur to him consolingly.  Vic was a responsibility; a comfort he was not.  Like many men, Peter could not seem to understand his son half as well as he understood his daughter.  He could not see why Vic should frivol away his time; why he should have all those funny little conceits and airs of youth; why he should lord it over Helen May who was every day proving her efficiency and her strength of character anew.  If Helen May went the way her mother had gone, Peter felt that he would be alone, and that life would be quite bare and bleak and empty of every incentive toward bearing the little daily burdens of existence.