"Never mind; the making over doesn't cost anything; you turn off work so easily; and then you've got a really stylish thing."
"But with all the ripping and remodelling, I don't get time to turn round, myself, and live! It is all fall work, and spring work, and summer work and winter work. One drive rushes pell-mell right over another. There isn't time enough to make things and have them; the good of them, I mean."
"The girls get it; we have to live in our children," said Mrs. Megilp, self-renouncingly. "I can never rest until Glossy is provided with everything; and you know, Laura, I am obliged to contrive."
Mrs. Megilp and her daughter Glaucia spent about a thousand dollars a year, between them, on their dress. In these days, this is a limited allowance—for the Megilps. But Mrs. Megilp was a woman of strict pecuniary principle; the other fifteen hundred must pay all the rest; she submitted cheerfully to the Divine allotment, and punctually made the two ends meet. She will have this to show, when the Lord of these servants cometh and reckoneth with them, and that man who has been also in narrow circumstances, brings his nicely kept talent out of his napkin.
Desire Ledwith, a girl of sixteen, spoke suddenly from a corner where she sat with a book,—
"I do wonder who 'they' are, mamma!"
"Who?" said Mrs. Ledwith, half rising from her chair, and letting some breadths of silk slide down upon the floor from her lap, as she glanced anxiously from the window down the avenue. She did not want any company this morning.
"Not that, mamma; I don't mean anybody coming. The 'theys' that wear, and don't wear, things; the theys you have to be just like, and keep ripping and piecing for."
"You absurd child!" exclaimed Mrs. Ledwith, pettishly. "To make me spill a whole lapful of work for that! They? Why, everybody, of course."
"Everybody complains of them, though. Jean Friske says her mother is all discouraged and worn out. There isn't a thing they had last year that won't have to be made over this, because they put in a breadth more behind, and they only gore side seams. And they don't wear black capes or cloth sacks any more with all kinds of dresses; you must have suits, clear through. It seems to me 'they' is a nuisance. And if it's everybody, we must be part of it. Why doesn't somebody stop?"