Yet the anxieties pressed; the wrinkles on Mr. Forman’s forehead grew deeper; he spent fewer evenings with his family, but sat apart working over columns of figures or gravely staring at them, evidently lost in troubled thought. His sister, from the farther end of the living-room, often watched him furtively, wondering how she could learn, without seeming officious, just what was the pressure that they were evidently trying to keep from her. Without having been consciously enlightened by any of them, she was beginning to have a strong conviction that it had to do with money matters. They did not talk economy, at least before her, but they practiced it; and she, being quick of eye and keen of hearing, had seen and heard enough since she had been a member of the family to convince her that careful economy even in the smallest matters was the rule of the house. Of course, she could understand that sickness, with its endless train of expenses, had greatly increased the regular budget, but still there seemed to her an added distress that these long-foreseen bills did not account for.
It was Derrick, the heedless, who finally enlightened her without in the least intending to do so. He tapped at her door one afternoon, pushed it open in response to her invitation, and with a quick glance around announced, in a disappointed tone, “She isn’t here!”
“Not yet,” his aunt said, smiling, “but she will be, before long. That is, if you are looking for Ray? You generally are, you know. Come in and wait for her; she has gone with Kendall to look at the negatives for those class pictures.”
Derrick dropped into the chair indicated as he said, with a discontented air, that Kendall was a good deal of a nuisance; he seemed to be always wanting Ray at the very same minute that he wanted her himself.
“I suppose, though, instead of growling, I ought to be counting my mercies because he hasn’t carried her off bodily to some other house. I can’t always be properly sorry over their numerous delays, for being glad he hasn’t got her yet.”
Here surely was an opportunity for Aunt Elsie. “What is it that is delaying them now?” she asked, with the air of one who was simply keeping up her end of the conversation.
“Oh, the everlasting hindrance, of course; money, or the lack of it. When I get really to work in this world, if I can’t earn money enough to do the things that ought to be done, I’ll go—” He stopped suddenly and laughed. His aunt smiled appreciatively.
“You can’t ‘go hang yourself,’ after your favorite method,” she said, cheerfully, “because you don’t belong to yourself any more. What is to be done in such case?”
“I’ll go earn more,” he finished, gayly. He was trying to live up to the spirit of the hint she had once given him, that “random speeches partaking of the character of slang could easily be given too much license, if one were not careful.”
Up to that time he had not realized that he habitually talked in metaphors more or less related to the slang family. He had begun to watch himself, with a view to breaking the habit, but he considered it “awfully nice” in Aunt Elsie not to be always preaching at a fellow.