“I am so glad,” said Mrs. Lennox; and there was congratulation in the tone, although she said no more. “You have done me so much good since I have known you, Mrs. Bishop, that I feel I may trouble you a little further about my affairs without exhausting your patience.”
“You certainly may, if I can do anything.”
“I must seem a perfect ignoramus to you, and yet I’m an old married woman and you’re a young one; but the fact is, I was married directly after I left school. I knew nothing of housekeeping, for my mother had been such an invalid that we always boarded at that time. Mr. Lennox was full of hope that he would rise to great things,—all young writers are,—but, unluckily, the hard times of ’73 came, and the magazine of which he was sub-editor, and which he hoped to edit, succumbed, and ever since then he has been forced to plod on, at what insures us bread. He has never dared to try for better things, and I know he frets at seeing me so overworked, and has been telling me for years if I would sew less, and cook more, I should be better; but first one must ‘know how’ to cook, and I don’t. There is one thing, however, I do see now, that I never did before; and that is, that if I give my time to preparing the food, I can save enough to get the sewing I cannot do done for me. I never realized this before, but now I do. This is Friday, and we have lived nicely—I mean we have had food we enjoyed, and I have spent $2 less; and the sewing I should have done in the time I have cooked would not have amounted to one full day’s work, which I can get done for a dollar.”
“I am glad you see it so. I was sure of it, and I am sure that the effort to do so much sewing and the housework, too, is far more wearing than double the quantity of either alone would be.”
“Yes, because I dread to lose a minute, and the cooking always seemed such a loss.”
“I wonder you have not thought it cheaper to keep a servant.”
Mrs. Lennox dropped her work in her lap, and looked at Molly in astonishment.
“Cheaper! why, I should feel I was ruined at once.”
“Let us talk it over a bit, and see if my idea is right or yours. You pay a woman to wash?”
“Yes, I spend $8 a month in getting help, a dollar a week for washing, and the other dollar I divide between the heavy ironing and roughest cleaning; the rest I do myself.”