"I give you twenty-five cents a week for church money," she parried weakly.
"That's what you think I ought to give. I want an allowance, and then I can deny myself and give what I like."
"Forester earns his," said my mother; she hadn't of course meant the discussion to get on to a basis of reasonableness.
"Well," I threatened, "I'll earn mine."
That was really what did the business in the end. All the boys in Taylorville worked as soon as they were old enough, but it was the last resort of poverty that girls should be put to wages. Before that possibility my mother retreated into amused indulgence. She paid me my allowance, appreciably less than my brother's, on the first of the month, with the air of concurring in a joke, which I think now must have covered some vague hurt at my want of sympathy with the beautiful fiction of Forester's growing up to take my father's place with her. They had achieved by the time Forester was twenty, what passed for perfect confidence between them, though it was at the cost of Forester's living shallowly or not at all in the courts of boyhood which my mother was unable to reënter, and her voluntary withdrawal from varieties of experience from which his youth prevented him. My mother always thought it was made up to her in affection; what came out of it for Forester is still on the knees of the gods.
I began to say how it was that the Gift took care of itself while Forester was engrossing the family attention. He had had a year at the business college in Montecito, which was considered quite sufficient, and rather more, in fact, than his accepted vocation as the support of his mother seemed to call for. Any question that might naturally come up of a profession for him, seemed to have been quashed beforehand by the general notion of an immediate salary as the means to that end. I do not recall a voice lifted on behalf of a life of his own. He had worked up from driving the delivery wagon in vacations to being dry goods clerk at the Coöperative, where his affability and easy familiarity with the requirements of women, made him immensely popular. Everybody liked to trade with Forester because he took such pains in matching things, and he was such a good boy to his mother. He paid the largest portion of his salary for his board, and took Effie, who adored him, about with him. I don't mean to say that he was not also good friends with Olivia, or that there was anything which prevented my doing my best with the three chocolate layer cakes and the angel's food I made for his party on his twenty-first birthday.
The real unpleasantness on that occasion came of my mother's notion of distinguishing it among all other birthdays by paying over to Forester a third of the not very considerable sum left by my father, derived chiefly from his back pay as an officer, which she had always held as particularly set aside for us children. It was owing perhaps to a form of secretiveness that in unprotected woman does duty for caution, that Effie and I had scarcely heard of this sum until it was flourished before us on the day before the birthday, much as if it had been my father's sword, supposing the occasion to have required it being girded on his son.
Forester was to have a third of that money in the form of a check under his plate on the morning of his birthday. Effie and I did full justice to the magnificence of the proposal. I was beating the whites of thirteen eggs by Pauline's recipe for angel food—mine called for only eleven—and Effie was rubbing up Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons, which had been borrowed for the party.
I was always happier in the kitchen than in any room of the house, with its plain tinted walls, the plain painted woodwork (the parlour was hideously "grained"), and the red of Effie's geraniums at the window ledge. The stir of domesticity, all this talk of my father, intrigued me for the moment into the sense of being a valued and intrinsic part of the family.
"His father would have wanted Forester to have that money," said my mother, "now that he's of age."