“Why do people always begin to economize in coal as soon as they get a bit hard up?” Josie asked herself. “It is a strange question in psychology.”
She greeted Mary Louise cheerfully and seizing the poker gave the sputtering coal a few masterly punches which sent the flames leaping up the chimney. Then she vigorously poked out the ashes under the grate and, in a few moments, the fire was burning as brightly and cheerily as though the Colonel’s money had been found and no tragic happenings had recently taken place in that very house which the grate helped to warm.
“That’s better!” laughed Mary Louise. “Uncle Eben is so lugubrious about the coal’s getting low and so strict lately in regard to fires that I find myself shivering half the time. Fires have always been Uncle Eben’s specialty and, now that times are hard, his one idea is to save coal. Uncle Eben and Aunt Sally are my biggest problem right now, Josie.”
Josie smiled in what might almost have been termed a self-satisfied way. Had she not asserted but a few moments before to the girls at the Higgledy Piggledy that Mary Louise would still always be thinking of others?
“What are you planning to do with them, Mary Louise?” she asked quite casually. Josie had an idea that Mary Louise’s friends were handling her too gingerly. Instead of asking direct questions that called for direct answers, they were dealing too much in innuendoes, afraid all the time of intruding. She well knew that Irene’s exquisite sense of propriety would keep her from going into Mary Louise’s affairs until she was asked to discuss them by Mary Louise herself. Josie felt that the girl had brooded long enough and the time had come to talk things over.
“Now don’t you tell me if you’d rather not, but it seems to me you might as well talk it out with me. I’m a kind of father confessor anyhow, you know, honey,” continued Josie.
“Why I want to talk it over, Josie dear. I don’t want to burden anyone with my complicated affairs but—”
“Burden anyone! Why you little goose! Come on now, let’s decide what you are going to do and then let’s do it.”
Mary Louise laughed, and her laugh sounded quite merry and like her old self. “Josie, you certainly do help me with your plain, straight methods. You know, I fancy, that there is no money to be found—none at all—and I am penniless?”
“Yes, I know it, and I’m glad of it!”