“Thanks. I will tell you when to go ahead.”
“We like to have plenty of time on your work, Mr. Pendleton,” said Graustein.
Two hundred dollars! Once upon the street again, Don caught his breath. His bill at Graustein’s had often amounted to three times 147 that, but it had not then come out of a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. Without extra expenses he seldom had more than a dollar left on Saturday. By the strictest economy, he figured, it might be possible to save five. To pay a bill of two hundred dollars would at that rate require forty working weeks. By then the clothes would be worn out.
It was facts like these that brought home to Don how little he was earning, and that made that ten-thousand-dollar salary appear like an actual necessity. It was facts like these that helped him to hold on.
But it was also facts like these that called his attention to this matter of cost in other directions. Within the next two months, one item after another of his daily life became reduced to figures, until he lived in a world fairly bristling with price-tags. Collars were so much apiece, cravats so much apiece, waistcoats and shoes and hats so much. As he passed store windows the price-tags were the first thing he saw. It seemed that everything was labeled, even such articles of common household use as bed-linen, chairs and tables, carpets and draperies. 148 When they were not, he entered and asked the prices. It became a passion with him to learn the cost of things.
It was toward the middle of May that Frances first mentioned a possible trip abroad that summer.
“Dolly Seagraves is going, and wishes me to go with her,” she announced.
“It will take a lot of money,” he said.
“What do you mean, Don?”
One idle evening he had figured the cost of the wedding trip they had proposed. He estimated it at three years’ salary.