There is a certain intellectual town in America where tramcars still issue return tickets at reduced rates. How well I remember two dear maiden ladies, armed with principles, walking up and down in the snow and sleet of a winter's night one whole hour waiting for the particular tram which would accept their tickets. They let unnumbered other trams jingle merrily past, while they paddled about in the slush, strong in their sense of economy. They each saved three cents, and one nearly died of pneumonia.
One wonders how many of us die because of our reckless economy? Are we not for ever doing things for which we have neither the strength nor the capacity, just to save a few pennies, and do not many of us repent all our life long? I well remember a lady who to save hiring a man, lifted her piano to slip a rug under. When I saw her, she had, in consequence, been a helpless invalid for years with an incurable spine complaint.
Are not cheap servants another favourite female economy? I have seen a sensible woman rejoice because she had captured a cheap servant as if, what with aggravation of spirits and broken crockery, a cheap servant does not take it out of one in nervous prostration. Not to mention that the incompetent eat just as much as the competent!
Did I not read this very day how two delightful female economists, waiting for the opening of a certain theatre, sat on camp-stools from nine in the morning till seven in the evening of a cold, damp winter day for a chance to dive into the pit, and so to save a shilling or two. Was there ever a more cheering example of feminine wisdom and thrift?
I knew a woman who had the economical fad to get double service out of a match, but she found it awfully expensive. She went upstairs one night to dress for dinner. A doorway, hung with a frail, floppy art-curtain, connected her bedroom and her dressing-room. As she entered, she heard shrieks of "fire" in the street, and tearing open the window she found the house opposite in flames, and in an instant fire-engines came clattering through the crowd. She was a kind soul, but she did enjoy herself immensely, watching it comfortably from her window. It was over in no time, and as she looked at the chaos of fire-engines and firemen the thought struck her how convenient it would be if there were another fire just then in the street, for here they all were ready to put it out!
Whereupon she lighted the gas, and, true to her principles, carried the burning match to her dressing-room, through the floppy art-curtain. The next instant it was all in a blaze, and she was hanging out of the window shrieking "fire." They broke down her front door, trailed miles of dirty oozing hose upstairs, and finally left her gazing drearily at the black ceiling, the sodden furniture, the dirty water pouring downstairs, and a hideous burnt wall where the fatal art-curtain had been.
"At any rate," she said to herself, as she took a great, long breath, "it was convenient."
But since then she has never used a match twice.
How we all do love to save at the spiggot even if it does pour out at the bung-hole! Who of us has not seen a woman grow thin and sharp and old, in the struggle to save pennies while her open-handed husband throws away pounds? It takes a big, broad-minded woman to know when to open her purse-strings, and perhaps even a bigger and more strong-minded one to keep them always comfortably ajar.
At what early age can the girl-child be taught that what is too cheap is usually very dear? The majority of women never learn it. How many a woman goes out to buy a warm woollen frock and returns home with a be-chiffoned tissue-paper silk, because it was cheap and looked so "smart." That ghastly, temporary smartness which is a kind of whited sepulchre! There is no doubt that the Englishwomen—and I include the Americans—are the most extravagant in the world.