"He thinks twenty-five cents will buy a dinner for us all, and keep us in clothes, and get new furniture, and dishes! He will have it that it is because things are wasted that we have such poor meals. As if I had anything to waste! I don't know what to do, nor which way to turn. We need everything."
"Don't you think we had better clean house to-day?" Nettie asked a little timidly, as they rose from the table and she began to gather the dishes.
"Clean house!" repeated the dazed mother. "Why, yes, child, I suppose so. It needs it badly enough. Oh, we can wash up the floor, and the shelf. It doesn't take long; there are not many things in the way. No furniture to move. But it doesn't stay clean long, I can tell you. Just one room in which to do everything! I might have kept it looking better, though, if I had not been sick. I have just had to let everything go, child. Lying awake nights, and worrying, have used me up."
She took the broom as she spoke and began to sweep vigorously, scurrying the children out of her way.
It was a long day, and a busy one. And at night, the room certainly looked better. The floor had been scrubbed with hot lye to get off the grease, and the stove had been blackened until the children shouted that it would do for a looking-glass. Several other improvements had been made. But after all, to Nettie's eyes it was dreadfully bare and comfortless. Not a cushioned chair, nor a rocker, nor anything that to her seemed like home. All day she had been casting glances at a closed door which opened from the kitchen, and thinking her thoughts about the room in there. A large square room, perfectly empty. Why wasn't it used? If for nothing else, why didn't Norm sleep in it, instead of in that dreadful unfinished attic where the rats must certainly have full sweep? Or why did not her mother move in there with the trundle bed, instead of being cooped up in that small bedroom? Or why had they not prepared it for her to sleep in, if they really did not want it for anything else? She gathered courage at last, to ask questions.
"Oh, that room," her mother said with bitterness, "when I first came here to live, we pleased ourselves nights, after the children were in bed, telling what we would have in it. We meant to furnish it for a parlor. We were going to have it carpeted; he wanted a red carpet, and I wanted a brown one with a little bit of pink in, but land! I would have taken one that was all yellow, just to please him. And we were going to have a lounge, and two rocking chairs, and I don't know what not. And there it is, shut up. I might have had it for a bedroom at first, but I wouldn't. I wanted to save it. And then, when I gave that all up, there was nothing to fix it with. Norm couldn't sleep there without curtains to the windows; no more could we; it is right on the street, almost.
"And things keep getting worse and worse, so I just shut the door and locked it and let it go. If I had had a spare chair to put in, I might have gone in there and cried, now and then, but I hadn't even that. I tried to rent it; but the woman who was hunting rooms heard that your father drank, and was afraid to come. Oh, we have a splendid name in the place, you'll find. We are just going to ruin as fast as a family can; that's the whole story."
In the middle of the afternoon, when Nettie had done everything she could think of, unless some money could be raised, and some clothes made, so that the children could have the ones washed which they were wearing, she stood in the back door, wondering how that could be brought about, when Jerry appeared in his favorite seat on the sawhorse.
"Everything done up for the day?" he asked.
Nettie laughed.