Making the House a Home

by Edgar A. Guest

The honeymoon trip lasted two weeks; and one day, at Mackinac Island, I found Mother in tears.

"What the matter?" I asked.

"I want to go home!" she said. "I know I am silly and foolish, but I want to get back to our own house and our own furniture, and arrange our wedding presents, and hang the curtains, and put that set of Haviland china in the cabinet!"

So back we came to begin our home-building in earnest.

The rent and the furniture installments came due regularly, just as we had expected. So did the gas and electric light and telephone bills. But, somehow or other, our dream figures and the actual realities did not balance. There never was a month when there was as much left of our eighty-seven dollars as we had figured there should have been.

For one thing, I was taken ill. That brought the doctor into the house; and since then we have always had him to reckon with and to settle with. Then there was an insurance policy to keep up. In our dream days, the possibility of my dying sometime had never entered our heads; but now it was an awful reality. And that quarterly premium developed a distressing habit of falling due at the most inopportune times. Just when we thought we should have at least twenty dollars for ourselves, in would come the little yellow slip informing us that the thirty days' grace expired on the fifth.

But the home-of-our-own was still in our dreams. We were happy, but we were going to be still happier. If ever we could get rid of those furniture installments we could start saving for the kind of home we wanted.

Then, one evening, Mother whispered the happiest message a wife ever tells a husband. We were no longer to live merely for ourselves; there was to be another soon, who should bind us closer together and fill our lives with gladness.

But—and many a night we sat for hours and planned and talked and wondered—how were we to meet the expense? There was nothing in the savings bank, and much was needed there. Mother had cherished for years her ideas for her baby's outfit. They would cost money; and I would be no miserly father, either! My child should have the best of everything, somehow. It was up to me to get it, somehow, to.... If only that furniture were paid for!

Then a curious event occurred. I owed little bills amounting to about twenty-one dollars. This sum included the gas, electric light, and telephone bills, on which an added sum was charged if unpaid before the tenth of the month. I had no money to meet them. I was worried and discouraged. To borrow that sum would have been easy, but to pay it back would have been difficult.