"Braid!" cried Ruth. "We'll get narrowest silk soutache—Jessamy shall draw a design—and you shall braid the entire front breadth of your skirt, Bab, resolving with each stitch to be neater in the future."
"I never saw such cleverness!" cried Jessamy, admiringly, while Bab made a wry face over the prospect.
"And now for house wear," said Ruth. "Here are some pretty light silks; the skirts are good, but the waists are worn out."
"I thought, perhaps, we could make fancy waists of the skirts to wear with our cloth gowns," said Phyllis, doubtfully, turning over a heap of light colors.
"Could? Why, of course we can. Let's rip them now," said Ruth, whipping out her own little scissors with alacrity. The four pairs of hands made quick work of the ripping, and Ruth cut out three waists by the tissue-paper patterns she had brought, pinned and basted them together, and left her friends to carry out her instructions.
Phyllis proved most adept at the new art; Jessamy succeeded fairly, but Bab had a dreadful time with her waist. Seams puckered and drew askew because of her reckless way of sewing them up in various widths, yet she felt aggrieved when the waist proved one-sided on trying on. And as to sleeves, Bab's would not go in with anything approaching civility and decorum. The poor child ripped, basted, tried on, ripped again, refusing all help in her proud determination to be independent, till her cheeks were purple, and she threw the waist down in despair and cried forlornly.
Tom surprised her in this tempest, and laughed at her until she longed to flay him. Then, sincerely repentant for having aggravated her woes, he humbly begged her pardon, and took her out for a walk with Nixie to cool her cheeks and calm her ruffled nerves. When she returned, Phyllis had taken it upon herself to disregard her wishes, and had basted in the refractory sleeves for her, which, like everything else, had yielded to Phyllis's charm and gone meekly into place. From this point Bab's path was smooth before her, and the last of the three waists, the first attempt of the girls at practical work, was brought to a triumphant finish.
There was real pleasure in using their wits in these things, the girls found; there was truly a bright side to poverty. But the ugly side remained—the jealousy of the three girls who were their opposites at table, as well as literally, and who disliked the Wyndhams for their difference in accent, manners, birth, for their unlikeness to themselves, for which neither side was to blame nor to praise.
And Mrs. Wyndham was ailing, fretting her heart out over the present situation and her poor girls' future. And—hardest of all to bear—the landlady made them feel that she considered the rate of their board insufficient to remunerate her for the immense, though to them imperceptible, generosity with which she served them.
But the most serious aspect of the anxieties closing in around the Wyndhams was that, in spite of all their prudence, money slipped away, laundry bills took on alarming proportions, and they had never dreamed how fast five-cent car fares could swell into as many dollars. Although they had taken care to make their expenditures come well within their income, they saw that there was not going to be enough to meet an emergency should it arise, and Jessamy and Phyllis talked till midnight many a night discussing how they could put their young shoulders to the wheel and join the great army of wage-earners.