Well, Tommy, I promised to write you how things were, after we got settled down. I must say the outlook is rather discouraging at times—and home isn't what it was as you remember it! Do you remember what fun we used to have even in Hunter's Run—driving in to "the balls"—and how fine it was in Mitchellton as long as you were there? Well, everything is sadly changed now! Wallie, I'm afraid, hasn't improved as he gets older, he seems to rarely or never think of anybody but himself—and, of course, having fun is simply something he doesn't care for! He shuts himself up in his room every night, making horrible mixtures in a "sink" he's put in—that smell up the whole house, and never dreams of contributing to the housekeeping expenses—though he's been raised now to ten dollars a week! Father is sadly changed, he gets quieter and quieter all the time.
Sometimes I'm really worried about him, he's so indifferent! He never jokes any more, and doesn't try to get any patients, though I know he could get lots with his reputation. He seems despondent, Tommy, and sometimes doesn't even come in for his office-hour—and the other day he lost a patient that way that the Finchmans sent, she waited half an hour and then went! But though he may have liked the country life better; and let us all vegetate; that can't be it—for he certainly made no objection when the family consensus seemed to be that we should move here! Of course, we have to face the fact that he and mother aren't very congenial, it is her problem, and while I wouldn't criticize mother for worlds and she certainly does her duty as wife and mother—I do think it's a great mistake for her to always make her attitude a sort of reproach, saying how "she's sacrificed herself to him" and all—you know what I mean—
Mother really gets along better than any of us—especially as I now do all the work of the entire house!
The young writer paused, staring chillily at the register. She rarely looked out the window now, hers being the blank certainty that there would be nothing to see. Moreover, it was dusk. So, rising presently, she lighted the gas, and resumed her sad sisterly letter.
Of her mother she wrote in some detail: of the various friends of her girlhood she had renewed acquaintance with, and how she was always exchanging calls with Cousin This or Martha That, who was So-and-So before she married. To Angela, it had really seemed funny how all these connections of her mother's, whose social possibilities they had so often discussed before they left Mitchellton, had resolved themselves into dejected old ladies who had had unhappy marriages, and whose children had also had unhappy marriages, as a rule, or were in some other way unavailable as friends. Out of five families thus exhumed by Mrs. Flower, positively only one unattached young person had emerged, and this one, named Jennie Finchman (!), while certainly well-meaning, was a shy, anxious, painfully homely little thing who had never had a good time in her life, and gave all her pocket-money to a mission in the Dutch East Indies.
Well, Tommy [continued Angela], I've tried to give you a picture of the new home like I promised—and I only wish it was more encouraging! As for myself—the only outside person I had to help me was Cousin Mary Wing, and she is a "New Woman," as I wrote you in my Thanksgiving Day letter, and doesn't go with anybody but advanced older people!—and, besides, she got into a terrible scrape, poor dear, and was dismissed from the school! Cousin Mary, it's only fair to say, has done more for me than anybody else, introducing me to her older woman friends—who have called on me, and several have invited me to teas, lectures, and etc.! But, of course, none of them were social people really, or at least of the younger set—and I practically haven't been invited to a single party, except "dove ones"! The one exception was a meeting of an "advanced club," where I met several attractive men, who have been as nice to me as you could possibly expect.
But the truth is, Tommy, money counts a great deal more here than it did in Mitchellton; all the girls who are prominent socially have wealthy families behind them! I think I would hold up the family end quite well on very little—but I have hardly a decent "rag to my back," my clothes let everybody know I am a person of no importance, so the little inner circle sees no reason to take me up,—mother and I have figured that with only fifty dollars I could get a really nice new suit, and a simple evening dress as well,—and perhaps hat and shoes, all of which I sorely need! But, of course, poor father simply hasn't got such a sum, and Wallie puts all his in the bank—for college next year, he has $240 there now! Tommy, you know I don't mean to accuse the family of being selfish,—father told us in advance that we would be poorer here,—but besides that—nobody in the family but you ever seemed to understand that a girl can't accomplish anything unless she is given some sort of a chance. Even mother doesn't understand, she just thinks "things happen"! She is always telling how in her day men would work hard all day "superintending the farms"—and then at night ride twenty miles on horseback, to just talk for an hour to some girl of no special attractions! I can't make her see that men simply aren't like that any more.
The concluding paragraph of the letter merely described the writer's own daily round, especially touching on the dull walks, so rarely broken by a familiar face, which remained almost her only form of recreation. Here Angela decided to put in one sentence in a less reserved vein, which she did: "Well, Tommy, if you mean to make any thank-offerings to 'the poor' this Christmas, you know where they will be most appreciated!" But, as she loved her brother devotedly, it was also natural for her to return to a sweet and generous note in farewell: "For your sake, Tommy, I am glad you aren't here, with all the trials and hardships, but out in the world having a happy life of your own!"
The completion, stamping, and sending-off of the letter to Tommy left Angela with a sense of definite accomplishment. It was as if something pleasant had happened in the family at last, or at least was going to happen very soon. Unfortunately, however, this agreeable feeling, having such small relation to reality, was born but to sicken and die. Time proceeded with no pleasanter happenings than before, and a letter from Daniel Jenney, of Mitchellton—whose ring had caused the trouble—became a positive event.
By now, no doubt, the first natural excitement of "going to the city" to live had subsided. Enthusiastic anticipations had been rubbed bare by hard actuality, poverty, Finchmans, and so on. By this time also the young home-maker had systematized her housekeeping, as she herself said, and commonly ordered from butcher and grocer by means of Mrs. Doremus's telephone, three doors away. With experience, too, Angela had cut down the daily area of cleaning and polishing, from her first youthful excesses. Small incentive there was to rub your fingers to the bone on a house which was hopeless from the start, and which practically nobody but her mother's sad friends ever set foot in. Thus—and also through the all but eccentric indifference of the men of her family to beauty and charm—Angela had more time than ever for thinking. And the more she thought, the more clearly she saw that social progress in a strange city was solely a matter of what might be called favorable self-advertisement, and that this sort of advertisement, in her case at least, was solely a matter of just a little money.
But where was money to come from? Little could be expected from Tommy, even at the best. As for the housekeeping allowance (on which home-makers properly rely for some personal "pickings"), that held out, alas, yet frailer hopes. So closely had her father and mother calculated the budget, indeed, that in three months she had squeezed but five dollars and a half out of it: this, though she had early investigated the cheaper cuts of meat and learned the desirability of never paying cash.
"Oh," thought the girl, again and again,—"if father'd only get some patients!"
Mary Wing's pretty sitting-room had, indeed, established definitely in Angela's mind the close connection between money and work in an office. But, for the sound reasons explained by her to Cousin Mary, Angela could never consider work in an office as a possibility for herself. What, really, would become of the Home, while she went rushing daily to an office, to make money for her personal adornment? Besides, she could not but see that Cousin Mary was herself proof of the fact that going to an office had a very unfortunate effect upon a girl. Argue as you liked, the fact remained that, even in this so-called advanced age, the normal, sweet, attractive girls, the girls who were prominent socially, were never office-girls.