“And pickles,” put in Bea generously, “with striped ice-cream.”
“And angel food with chocolate frosting an inch thick,” contributed Lila.
“It’s a long time till spring,” said Robbie Belle regretfully, “but very likely we will need all that while to save it up.”
As it turned out, they did need all that while to save it up. For beauty-loving Berta with her eternally slim purse and hopelessly meagre account-book, the plan at first seemed only a vision of the moment. Nobody can save out of nothing, can she? Robbie Belle, however, had a stubborn fashion of clinging to an idea when once it became fixed. Her ideas, furthermore, were apt to be clean-cut and definite. This is how she reasoned it out:
If a girl receives five dollars a month from home to pay for books and postage and incidentals, she is entitled to whatever she saves from the allowance. Every time this girl refrains from writing a letter, she has really saved two cents or the value of the stamp, to say nothing of the paper. Whenever she walks down town instead of riding, she has a right to the nickel to add to the fund in the back of her top bureau drawer. If she buys a ten-cent fountain-pen instead of a dollar one, she virtually earns ninety cents. If she rents a grammar for twenty-five cents instead of paying one dollar and a half for a new book, she is a thrifty person who deserves the difference. Every time she declines—mournfully—to drop in at the restaurant for dinner with a crowd of friends, or refuses to join in a waffle-supper, Dutch treat, she is so much nearer being a melancholy and noble capitalist.
“Yes, that’s all right for you,” assented Berta airily when told of this working theory, “but supposing you don’t have the money to save in the first place? I fail to receive five dollars a month from home or even one dollar invariably; and I always walk to town and never enter the restaurant except to wait while you save ten cents by buying half a pound of caramels when you want to buy a whole pound.”
“They’re forty cents a pound, Berta,” objected scrupulous Robbie Belle. “I really saved twenty cents yesterday, you see.”
“Ah, of course, how distressingly inaccurate of me. And I also—I saved five dollars and fourteen cents by using my wash-stand for a writing-table instead of buying that bargain desk for four dollars and ninety-eight cents. The extra fifteen was saved on the inkwell I did not buy either. I say, Robbie Belle Sanders, let’s save the entire sum by denying ourselves that set of Browning we saw last week.”
Robbie Belle looked grieved. “You always make fun of everything. You act as if you didn’t care.”
Berta turned away for a minute, and stood gazing from the window of her little tower room. The window was small and high, but the view was wide and wonderful toward the purple hills in the west. At length she said something under her breath. Robbie Belle heard it and understood. It was only, “I’m afraid.”