“How much you geeve?”
“Twenty francs.”
“Mon Dieu! Twenty francs! Ten was enough. She sink now we are made of money.”
Anastasia is always ready to remind me that we have entered on a régime of economy. She seems to have made up her mind that, like all Americans, I have no idea of the value of money, and that as a thrifty and prudent woman of the most thrifty and prudent race in the world, it behooves her to keep a close hand on the purse strings. I am just like a child, she decides, and she must look after me like a mother.
What a busy week it is! She takes into her own hands the furnishing of our home, calculating every sou, pondering every detail. Time after time we prowl past the furnishing shops on the Avenue du Maine, trying to decide what we had best take. There is a novel pleasure in this. Thus I am absurdly pleased when, on our deciding to take a table at twenty-two francs, I find a place where I can buy exactly the same for twenty-one.
We save money on the cleaning of the house by doing it ourselves. There is the floor to wax and polish. For the latter operation I sit down on a pad of several thicknesses of flannel, then she, catching my feet, pulls me around on the slippery surface till it shines like a mirror. We are very proud of that glossy floor, and regard our work almost with reverence, stepping on it as one might the sacred carpet of Mecca.
Then comes the furnishing. First, there is the bedroom. We buy two little beds of the fold-up variety, and set them side by side. Our bedding, though only of cotton, is, we decide, softer and nicer than linen and wool; and the pink quilt that covers both beds, could, we declare, scarce be told from silk. Our wardrobe—what is easier than to make a broad shelf about six feet high, and hang from it chintz curtains behind which a dozen hooks are screwed into the wall.
Equally simple are our other arrangements. A cosy corner can be deftly made of boards and cushions. She insists on me buying a superannuated armchair, and she re-covers it, so that it looks like new. She selects cheap but dainty curtains, a pretty table-cloth to hide the rough table, so that you’d never know; a little buffet, a mirror for the bedroom, pictures for the walls, kitchen things, table things—really, it’s awful how much you require for a ménage, and how quickly in spite of yourself your precious money melts.
These are the merry days, but at last all is finished—the first home. What if we have exceeded the margin a little? Everything is really cosy and comforting.
“This is an occasion,” I say. “Let us celebrate it.”