“She does, does she?” Morey challenged sharply. “Well, let me tell you, Mr. Porfirio, that every last scrap of my furniture allowance is accounted for! I don’t know what you’re getting at, but—”
“Oh, I certainly didn’t mean to imply anything like that! I just want to get some information from you that I can pass on to our readers. You know, to sort of help them do as well as yourself. How do you do it?”
Morey swallowed. “We—uh—well, we just keep after it. Hard work, that’s all.”
Porfirio nodded admiringly. “Hard work,” he repeated, and fished a triple-folded sheet of paper out of his pocket to make notes on. “Would you say,” he went on, “that anyone could do as well as you simply by devoting himself to it—setting a regular schedule, for example, and keeping to it very strictly?”
“Oh, yes,” said Morey.
“In other words, it’s only a matter of doing what you have to do every day?”
“That’s it exactly. I handle the budget in my house—more experience than my wife, you see—but no reason a woman can’t do it.”
“Budgeting,” Porfirio recorded approvingly. “That’s our policy, too.”
The interview was not the terror it had seemed, not even when Porfirio tactfully called attention to Cherry’s slim waistline (“So many housewives, Mrs. Fry, find it difficult to keep from being—well, a little plump”) and Morey had to invent endless hours on the exercise machines, while Cherry looked faintly perplexed, but did not interrupt.
From the interview, however, Morey learned the second half of the embezzler’s lesson. After Porfirio had gone, he leaped in and spoke more than a little firmly to Cherry. “That business of exercise, dear. We really have to start doing it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but you are beginning to get just a trifle heavier and we don’t want that to happen, do we?”