Frankly Ted, I don't see how you ever did it. I have had some experience with expense accounts having twenty salesmen on the road; but no travelling man I have employed, ever had the nerve to present such a collection of outrageous bills as was contained in your last letter.
I'll admit, I was prepared for a few modest accounts, mostly for extra food, for a boy your age is nearly always hungry, and of course they starve you at the Commons, although I managed to get quite a substantial meal there the night I had dinner with you. But as near as I can judge the Exeter townspeople must be on the verge of starvation, for surely you have consumed all the food supplies in all the stores in the township.
I put you on an allowance this year, so you could learn how to handle money, and so far the net result has been that you have given a most perfect example of how not to do it.
A boy who can't keep pretty close to his allowance, is going to grow into a man who can't live within his income, and neither are going to score many touchdowns in the game of life, although they may do a whole lot of flashy playing between the twenty yard lines. Besides, it's just as well to remember that no one yet ever succeeded in eating his way into Who's Who.
Perhaps some of it is hereditary, though, for I remember when your Uncle Ted first went away to school, your grandmother gave him an allowance and made him promise to keep account of every cent he spent.
When he came home on his first vacation, she sat down with him and went over his accounts, on the whole much pleased, because he had kept within what she had given him.
Every third or fourth entry was S. P. G. and being a devoutedly religious woman she was delighted to find her boy had given so much of his money to the Society for Propagation of the Gospel, until Ted, being honest, had to own up that S. P. G. stood for Something, Probably Grub.
Your bills for extra feed, would make those of a stable full of trotting horses look like the meal tickets of a flock of dyspeptic canaries. But I don't mind those so much for I don't want to see you starve.
What I do mind is six silk shirts at twelve per, and a dozen silk sox at three dollars a pair. Now when you are making $15,000 a year which you won't be for some time, if you want to pay twelve dollars for a shirt that's your funeral, although I rather suspect that by then you will have found out that real good shirts can be bought much cheaper.