“Oh, I love to,” said Lydia. She added reflectively: “Wouldn’t it be nice if things were so I could do the cooking myself and not have to bother with these horrible creatures that are all you can get usually?”
Paul laughed at the fancy. “That’s a high ambition for my wife, I must say!”
“We’d have better things to eat even than Ellen gives us,” said Lydia pensively. “If I had a little more time to put on it, I could do wonders, I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t doubt that,” said her husband gallantly; “but did you ever know anybody who was her own cook?”
“Well, not except in between times, when they couldn’t get anybody else,” confessed Lydia. “But lots of people I know who do go through the motions of keeping one would be better off without one. They can’t afford it, and—Oh, I wish we were poorer!”
Paul was highly amused by this flight of fancy. “But we’re as poor as poverty already,” he reminded her.
“We’re poor for buying hundred-dollar broadcloth tailor-made suits for me, and cut glass for the table, but we’d have plenty if I could wear ready-made serge at—”
Paul laughed outright. “Haven’t you ever noticed, my dear, that the people who wear ready-made serge are the ones who could really comfortably afford to wear calico wrappers? It goes right up and down the scale that way. Everybody is trying to sing a note above what he can.”
“I know it does—but does it have to? Wouldn’t it be better if everybody just—why doesn’t somebody begin—”
“It’s the law of progress, of upward growth,” pronounced Paul.