“Yes, my dear.”
“And entertain our friends?”
“Yes, my love,—with crumpets and tea.”
“Don’t forget muffins and bloater paste, and German sausage and occasional legs of mutton, you ungrateful man!”
“I don’t forget ’em, Mariar. My recollection of ’em is powerful; I may even say vivid.”
“Well,” continued the lady, “haven’t you been able to lend small sums on several occasions to friends—”
“Yes, my dear,—and they are still loans,” murmured the husband.
“And don’t we give a little—I sometimes think too little—regularly to the poor, and to the church, and haven’t we got a nest-egg laid by in the Post-office savings-bank?”
“All true, Mariar, and all your doing. But for your thrifty ways, and economical tendencies, and rare financial abilities, I should have been bankrupt long ere now.”
Mr Twitter was nothing more than just in this statement of his wife’s character. She was one of those happily constituted women who make the best and the most of everything, and who, while by no means turning her eyes away from the dark sides of things, nevertheless gave people the impression that she saw only their bright sides. Her economy would have degenerated into nearness if it had not been commensurate with her liberality, for while, on the one hand, she was ever anxious, almost eager, to give to the needy and suffering every penny that she could spare, she was, on the other hand, strictly economical in trifles. Indeed Mrs Twitter’s vocabulary did not contain the word trifle. One of her favourite texts of Scripture, which was always in her mind, and which she had illuminated in gold and hung on her bedroom walls with many other words of God, was, “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.” Acting on this principle with all her heart, she gathered up the fragments of time, so that she had always a good deal of that commodity to spare, and was never in a hurry. She gathered up bits of twine and made neat little rings of them, which she deposited in a basket—a pretty large basket—which in time became such a repository of wealth in that respect that the six Twitters never failed to find the exact size and quality of cordage wanted by them—and, indeed, even after the eldest, Sammy, came to the years of discretion, if he had suddenly required a cable suited to restrain a first-rate iron-clad, his mind would, in the first blush of the thing, have reverted to mother’s basket! If friends wrote short notes to Mrs Twitter—which they often did, for the sympathetic find plenty of correspondents—the blank leaves were always torn off and consigned to a scrap-paper box, and the pile grew big enough at last to have set up a small stationer in business. And so with everything that came under her influence at home or abroad. She emphatically did what she could to prevent waste, and became a living fulfilment of the well-known proverb, for as she wasted not she wanted not.