“I’m not trying to,” cried Dick, “but don’t you see that for you and for them to get along without things that they have a right to have is ridiculous!”
But she was stubborn. She sent back his first check without an instant’s thought of changing her position, although expenses already were beginning to trouble her. That strength which her mother had known was in her had already begun to bolster up her actions and her resolves.
“Do you think that if I did the upstairs work and took all the care of the children we could get along with just you and a laundress? Now that the family is smaller and since we shall be very quiet we might be able to manage it, don’t you think so?”
“I’d be glad,” said Ellen. “There’s not so much work as there used to be and now that you are taking so much care of the babies those nurses have time heavy on their hands.”
So the nurse and the housemaid problem was solved for Cecily by her getting along without them and the extra activity which was necessary for her helped her to fill many hours which might have been terribly disconsolate. That saved a hundred dollars a month for her.
She scraped her budget closer and closer. Cards from exclusive shops showing children’s clothes or gowns for herself went into the wastebasket. She went to the public library instead of to the booksellers for her books. Yet, in spite of all she tried to do and all she actually did accomplish she could not cut far enough to make her little income cover expenses. She was running behind at the end of the first month. Recalculations made her do a little better for a week after that. Then the baby had a week’s illness of no particular seriousness, but Cecily found herself confronting a presumable bill from the child specialist which would throw her budget into chaos again. She used the thousand dollars her father had given her for Christmas to bring her checking account up to normal and that exhausted her cash reserves.
There was a certain interest and pleasure in working it out, however. Work was almost her only refuge and it was one which she sought with redoubled interest and comfort constantly.
The mind which had been latent for so long began to develop as it was trained upon real problems and as she made herself independent, her own protector and her own refuge.
The moments when she was panic-stricken for want of a refuge—when she needed Dick or her mother to solve things, to smooth life over—became fewer and fewer. It amazed her to find how dependent she had been, to see how many things Dick had taken off her hands. That he still wanted to do them she knew, for there were rather pathetic attempts to pay garage bills; a watchdog was presented to her by her father, but she somehow guessed from the phrasing of the note that came with it that it had been Dick’s thought and that her father wanted her to know it. Such things hurt. It wasn’t that it made her feel more hopeful about herself and Dick. But she usually wanted to feel that Dick was happy and benefited by leaving her, and such things made her wonder. Then in the bitter, contradictory hours when she did not want him to be happy and when the resentment at the wreck of her own happiness scourged her, she was angry that he should attempt even anonymous courtesies.