"It costs us just ten dollars each week for marketing—and I know that our groceries are at least that, including flour; that you see makes twenty dollars, and we only get twenty-eight dollars for our eight boarders. Our rent will bring our expenses up to that. And then there are servants' wages, fuel, our own clothes, and the boys' schooling, besides what we lose every year, and the hundred little expenses which cannot be enumerated."
"Bless me, Mary! No wonder we have gone behindhand."
"Indeed, mother, it is not."
"We have acted very blindly, Mary."
"Yes, we have; but we must do so no longer. Let us give up our boarders, and move into a smaller house."
"But what shall we do Mary? Our money will soon dwindle away."
"We must do something for a living, mother, that is true. But if we cannot now see what we shall do, that is no reason why we should go on as we are. Our rent, you know, takes away from us eight dollars a week. We can get a house large enough for our own purposes at three dollars a week, or one hundred and fifty dollars a year, I am sure, thus saving five dollars a week there, and that money would buy all the plain food our whole family would eat."
"But it will never do, Mary, for us to go to moving into a little bit of a pigeon-box of a house."
"Mother, if we don't get into a cheaper house and husband our resources, we shall soon have no house to live in!" said Mary, with unwonted energy.
"Well, child, perhaps you are right; but I can't bear the thought of it," Mrs. Turner replied. "And any how, I can't see what we are going to do then."