The idea of his instilling principles of economy in anybody's mind was so funny all of us had to laugh. One thing Mr. Tucker insisted on was not spending money until you had it; but the minute you did have it, what was it meant for but to spend? "Easy come, easy go!" was the motto for the whole Tucker family.
"Oh, we will live so cheap I haven't a doubt we'll save oodlums of money!" cried Dum. "Mrs. Edwin Green told me a lot about how cheap one can live in Bohemia. She told us whenever we went to New York she was going to give us a letter of introduction to her brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Kent Brown."
Mrs. Edwin Green was the lovely young woman we had met in Charleston when we took our famous trip down there. She was a Miss Molly Brown of Kentucky who had married Professor Edwin Green of Wellington College. They were the very nicest couple I ever knew and we became great friends with them. We corresponded with her and a letter from "Molly Brown" was highly prized by all of us.
"Yes, and she said we were to visit her at Wellington if we got anywhere near. Won't it be great?" and Dee danced around the library from pure glee.
"How will we live in New York?" I asked. "Shall we board or what?"
"Board, by all means! If you try to live any other way you will run into debt, I am afraid," said Zebedee.
"But we just naturally despise boarding," pouted Dum. "We've been boarding all our lives, it seems to me."
"But when you board, you are in a measure chaperoned," said her cautious parent.
"Chaperoned! Oh, Zebedee, you make me laugh. What boarding-house keeper has time to chaperone? Besides, isn't Page along to chaperone?"
"What do you think about it, Page? Come along now with that sage advice," teased Father.