“I’m so glad I had it! Are you sure this will be enough?” she asked as the other kissed her fervently. What were clothes for herself in comparison with poor Bertha’s need? She would look over the catalogue again to-morrow, when she had time, and order a cheaper suit, or buy one ready made.
After all, she did neither. Her money—but why chronicle further the diminution of her forces? Delay made it as inevitable as the thaw after snow. Her entire downfall was completed the day she had unexpected and honorable company to dinner, and sent Sam out to the nearest shops instead of those at which she usually dealt, to “break a bill”—heart-rending process—in the purchase of fruits and sweets for their consumption. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why the change from five dollars never amounts to more than two dollars and sixteen cents. Poor Mrs. Atwood could never get quite used to the fact that if she spent money it was gone. She cherished an underlying hope that she could get it back somehow.
As the time approached for the Washington trip she did not dare to meet her Edward’s eye, and replied but feebly to his unusually jolly anticipations of “this time next week.” She had hoped that she might have some excuse to remain at home, much as she had longed for this jaunt alone with her husband, but there seemed to be no loophole of escape.
She tried to freshen up her heaviest skirt, and took the spring jacket she was wearing and made a thick lining to it, planning to disguise it further with a piece of fur at the neck. She felt horribly guilty when Josephine came in and caught her at it. The tall girl with her red cheeks just out of the wintry air looked at her mother with an inscrutable expression, but she merely said,
“I suppose that’s to save your new suit. You’ll never be able to get into it, if you put so much wadding in,” and went off again. The mother felt relieved, yet a little hurt, too, in some mysterious way.
Many a time she tried to screw her courage up to confessing that she had no outer raiment; that after all the money and all her promises she had nothing to show in exchange. The fatal moment had to come, but she put it off. She had done it so many times! For herself she did not mind; she could have confessed joyfully to all the crimes in the Decalogue, if it would have benefited her dear ones, but to wound their idea of her, to pain them by showing how unworthy she was, how unfit to be trusted—that came hard. She prayed a great deal about it on her knees by the bed in the dusk of her own room when she came upstairs after dinner, on the pretext of “getting something”; she belonged to the old-fashioned, child-like order of women who do pray about things, not only daily, but hourly, and who, unknown to themselves, exhale the sweetness born of heavenly contact.
She wondered if, perhaps, it might not be better if she were dead, she was such a poor manager, and set such a bad example to the children. Josephine had that clear common sense that she lacked. The girl was getting to be so companionable to her father, too. She had the sacrificial pleasure of the victim when she heard them laughing and talking downstairs together.
“Well, Jo, has your suit come home yet?”
It was three nights before the fateful Thursday, and the family were grouped in the library as was their wont in the evenings immediately after dinner. Eddy was lying on the fur rug playing with the cat in the warmth of the wood fire, and Mr. Atwood, in a big chair with his wife leaning on the arm of it, sat watching the little boy. The two older children were studying by a table in the back of the room in front of a shaded lamp, with a pile of books before them.
Mr. Atwood, although his hair and mustache were grizzled and his face prematurely lined, had a curious faculty of suddenly looking like a boy, under some pleasurable emotion; anticipation of his holiday made him young for the moment. His wife thought him beautiful.