“It would take seven yards, or I might get along with six and a half, it depends on the width. It’s the linings that make it mount up to so much, and the making. You can get a suit made for ten dollars; Cynthia Callender did, and hers looks well, but Mrs. Nichols went to the same place, and—”
“Will thirty dollars be enough?” asked Mr. Atwood with masculine directness, seeking for some tangible fact.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure it will be, I—”
“Then here’s fifty,” said Mr. Atwood. He counted out five tens and pushed them over to her. “Get a good suit while you’re about it, Jo.”
“Oh, Edward. I don’t want—”
“Make her take it,” said a girl of sixteen, rising from the corner where she had been sitting with a book in her hand, a very tall and thin and pretty girl, brunette like her mother, with a long black braid that hung down her back. She came forward and threw her arm around her mother’s neck, bending protectingly over her. “Make her take it, papa. She buys everything for me and the boys, and goes without herself, so that I’m ashamed to walk out in the street with her; it makes me look so horrid to be all dressed up when she wears that old spring jacket. When it’s cold she puts a cape over it. I wish you’d see that cape! She’s had it since the year one. She doesn’t dare wear it when she goes out with you, she just shivers.”
“Hush, hush, Josephine,” said the mother embarrassed, yet laughing, as her husband lifted his shaggy eyebrows at her in mock severity. “You needn’t say any more, either of you. I’ll take the money.” She paused impressively, and then gently pushed the girl aside and went over and kissed her husband.
“If I were only as good a manager as some people! I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I try, and I try, but—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the husband. “All I ask now is that you spend this money on yourself; it’s not for other needs. Remember! You are to spend it all on yourself.”
“Yes, I will,” said Mrs. Atwood, with the guilty thrill of the perjured at the very moment of her promise. She knew very well that some of it would have to be spent for other needs. She had but fifty cents left of her allowance to last her until the end of the month, five long days away. No one but the mother of a family of moderate means realizes what the demand for pads, pencils, shoestrings, lunches, postage stamps, hair ribbons, medicines, mended shoes, and such like can amount to in that short time. She had meant to ask Edward to advance her a little more on the next month’s allowance—already largely anticipated—but she had not the face to after his generosity to her now. A couple of dollars out of the fifty would make very little difference, and she did not need it all, anyway. She almost wept as she thought of Josephine’s championship of her, and her husband’s thoughtfulness.