'So you are pinching it out by pence, my poor W. W.!'
'Nothing extra must be done till this is made up.'
'Yet it seems needful that Bernard should go to school. I wrote about—'
'No,' she resolutely interrupted. 'Bernard must wait over this year. Thirty pounds. Utterly out of the question!'
Her tone gave Felix an unusual sense of chill penury, and brought Vale Leston before his eyes. He laughed rather bitterly, saying, 'Perhaps some day neither thirty pence nor thirty pounds may have so direful a sound!'
'I never mean to learn to waste.'
'You may have to learn to spend.'
'That's enough to set me against it!' she exclaimed, with a good deal of pain; and he found how nearly he had broken his resolution, and how her application of his words to herself had saved him. He followed the lead.
'Nay; you were glad of Alda's prosperity?'
'Oh yes; but poor Alda has been hindered from being like one of us,' she said. 'We have fought it out together. And I should not mind so much if he were poor, like us, and had to wait on his own account.'