6 
Psyche 
March 
indulged, and that was taking care of her investments. 
After her father’s death, her mother, mindful of the debacle 
of some years before, made arrangements, so that she got 
a fixed income and divided the family fortune between the 
two children. That was in the happy days before the income 
tax had been invented. The usual course would have been 
that Miss Bryant’s share be nut in a trust fund, but here 
her old friend, Mr. Henshaw, intervened. She took, as 
always, his advice and developed into an extremely shrewd 
and careful investor. Through her interest in her invest- 
ments, by reading newspapers and magazines, she acquired 
an unusual understanding of what was going on in the 
United States and in the world as a whole, and her down 
to earth realism and a total lack of sentimentality made 
conversations with her extremely interesting. 
In addition to her indisputable business ability, which 
would have made her a gift to a brokerage firm, she pos- 
sessed also the virtue, thrift. She saw to it that nothing 
was wasted in her house, got the utmost wear out of her 
few garments and she kept all unnecessary expenditures 
down to zero. She subscribed to a few magazines which 
she knew she could manage to read, and the back numbers 
were quickly passed on to some other person for whom she 
was happy to save the cost of a subscription. While despis- 
ing people who made themselves miserable by being “penur- 
ious” she enjoyed her own little pet economies. For years 
she would happily trot down a few blocks so that she could 
get home on the 5 cent fare, and until her last illness it was 
our monthly joke when she handed me her check for the 
Faculty Club and asked me to take it over to Harvard 
Square when I was paying my own bill, adding with mock 
seriousness: “I just can’t hear spending 3 cents on such 
a short distance, and the bus no longer sets me off in 
Harvard Square.” 
She felt her responsibility toward the needy, particularly 
children and old people, and she insisted on knowing where 
the money went. She saw to it that nothing was lost between 
her hand and that of the recipient. She lived for years in 
a rather poor district where as she once expressed it: “They 
are counting on my contribution” — and they got it. At 
