Letitia laughed.
“Why, how could a girl type-write, or trim hats, or even make jam, without knowing how? You’ve got to learn those things. I’ve tried to trim hats a dozen times, and always spoiled them; and one summer Maud undertook to make some jam, and it was perfectly awful—I don’t mean the jam: I mean the house while the jam was getting made. Maud and the Chinaman and Mortimer were all in such a bad temper!”
They walked on for a few moments in silence. Then Letitia continued:
“Why, even the girls who have fairly good positions in stores don’t get enough to live on. The girl who shampoos my hair has a sister in Abram’s, and she gets seven dollars a week, and has to be nicely dressed. Just fancy that!” said Letitia; and then, in a burst of candor: “Why, I never in this world could dress on that alone, even if I gave up silk stockings and always wore alpaca petticoats like the woman who teaches Maud German.”
“Nevertheless,” said Gault, “it seems to me that a woman who was high-minded and proud and independent would be a shop-girl and live on seven dollars a week rather than—”
He stopped. Letitia looked at him interestedly, struck by something in his tone.
“Rather than what?” she asked.
“Rather than—well, in this story the people who were so poor had friends that were well off, and all that sort of thing, and they borrowed from them, and—I think it’s going to turn out that they lived that way.”
“Did the girl borrow? Wouldn’t work and lived on the borrowed money? Oh, that’s—!”
Letitia raised both hands in the air and let them drop with a gesture that expressed complete finality of interest and approval.