“Oh! I couldn’t back out after I had asked her; and I owed her a little treat of some kind, for she invited me to see the cadet drill at her brother’s school.
“Well, after I had broken the ten dollar bill to get the tickets, the first thing I knew it was all gone. I knew mother wouldn’t mind, and that I could tell her any time after she came home, but it never seemed necessary to mention it in my letters and I never did.”
“Oh, Milly!”
“Horrid of me, wasn’t it? But I had worse temptations. My pocket money is so very skimpy compared with what the other girls have, and with what I have, too, in the way of credit for certain things, that I am often really embarrassed and have to turn and twist and borrow and pinch to make it stretch out. When you girls clubbed together and paid for Polo’s sisters at the Home, I wanted awfully to help, but I couldn’t. You see father lets me subscribe so much annually to the Home and he sends in a check every year for me, and thinks that ought to be enough. But I don’t feel as though I was giving it at all, for it does not even pass through my hands. I don’t deny myself to give it, as Adelaide does for her charities, and I haven’t a penny for any special case of distress or sudden emergency which I may happen to hear of.
“Do you know, Tib, that Satan actually suggested to me how easily I might have extra pocket money by ordering things from Celeste, and letting her sell them again in just the same way that she managed with the golden net? I knew that she would be glad enough to do it, for I found out afterward that Rosario Ricos bought that net of Celeste and paid her full price for it! So you see she kept back five dollars on the second sale, besides making a good commission on the first.”
“But you didn’t do it, Milly dear; you surely did not obtain your charity money in any such dishonest way as that?”
“No, Tib. I didn’t do it for charity. I some way felt that God would not accept such a gift from me; but there came a time when I had a worse temptation still. You know all last term papa used to ride with me every Saturday afternoon either at the riding academy or in the Park. Well, something is the matter with his liver; it hurts him to trot, and he has had to give it up, and Wiggins took me out. But I hate riding with a groom, and so one day when papa called I told him I didn’t care for any more riding this winter. This happened the week you went home to help tend your mother when she was sick, and that is the reason you never heard of it. I was taking father up to the studio when I said it, to show him Professor Waite’s Academy picture, and papa was so vexed with me about my not wanting to ride that he didn’t half notice the pictures.
“He took to Professor Waite, though, right away; and just as he was leaving asked him if he rode. ‘When I am so fortunate as to have the opportunity,’ Professor Waite replied.
“‘Very good,’ said papa. ‘Then possibly you will oblige me by accompanying my daughter and one of her friends on an occasional ride in the park.’ He explained that he had a good saddle horse, which needed exercise, which he would be glad to have him use; and that, what was more important, I needed exercise too, and was so perverse that I did not want to take it alone. ‘And now,’ said he, ‘the cruel parent proposes, Milly, to pay for another horse for one of your other girl friends. I suppose you will choose Adelaide, and if Professor Waite will act as your escort occasionally, I think you can manage to extract some pleasure from the exercise.’
“Of course I was perfectly delighted, and hugged papa, and called him a dear old thing. Professor Waite, who had looked awfully bored and had even begun to mumble something about being too busy, began to take an interest in the matter as soon as Adelaide’s name was mentioned, and papa had an interview with Madame and got her permission to let us ride every Saturday morning. Adelaide was down at her tenement, and it was left that I was to tell her when she returned, and I thought everything was settled. But when Adelaide came in she was looking troubled over some of her tenants’ tribulations and she only half listened to me.