[288]
]“Oh,” she said, “I know you think it is a stupid way to do accounts, but I get all wrong if I do them any other way. It’s as clear as anything to me.”
Clif expressed admiration for the brain power that could penetrate such a remarkable labyrinth, but Phyl took no notice.
“I ought to have one and six over,” she repeated; “and instead of that I’m seven shillings and eightpence-halfpenny short. . . . I’ve not paid the butter, and there’s my own halfcrown, and sixpence to be returned to the Red Box.”
“Where’s your purse?” Clif said, and Phyl produced the bulky housekeeping money-holder. There were receipts in it, little lists of “Wanteds” from the grocer, a poem or two cut out from magazines, and a review or two of their own little paper, now dead from want of funds. Clif passed these over and searched the middle compartment that contained four stamps, two shirt-buttons, sixpence, and the butter bill wrapped up with four and sixpence inside it. Phyl pounced joyfully on this. “I’d forgotten I’d paid that,” she said. “I missed the man on Monday, and wrapped it up, and then must have paid out of that sovereign. Oh, it’ll come out right now.”
Clif calculated rapidly again.
“We’ve got about two and tenpence too much now,” he said, and the wrestling began again.
“Well, may I speak now?” said Mrs. Wise, who had [289] ]gone on sewing while the statement of accounts was involving undivided attention.
Phyl leaned back and gave her mother an impulsive kiss. “What a patient little woman it is!” she said; “sometimes, Clif, when all of you are away she has a dreadful time of it. I know she is often dying to tell us something, but when she sees we are writing she bottles it all up and tip-toes away again.”
“And then I forget,” said Mrs. Wise plaintively. “I’ll have to invest in a phonograph, for sometimes it is a most interesting and important thing I have wanted to say.”
“We do let you talk at lunch,” Phyl said kindly; “at least, almost always.”