"Why not?"
"Everybody ought to save something—I am teaching my children to have penny banks—and yet I go on spending and spending with nothing to show for it."
Beulah was quite placid. "I don't see why you should save. Some day you will get married, and then you won't have to."
"If a woman marries a poor man she ought to be careful of finances. She has to think of her children and of their future."
Beulah shrugged. "What's the use of looking so far ahead? And 'most any husband will see that his wife doesn't get too much to spend."
Before Anne went to bed that night she put a part of her small store of money into a separate compartment of her purse. She would buy a cheaper frock and save herself the afterpangs of extravagance. And the penny banks of the children would no longer accuse her of inconsistency!
The shopping expedition proved a strenuous one. Anne had fixed her mind on certain things which proved to be too expensive. "You go for your fitting," she said to Beulah desperately, as the afternoon waned, "and I will take a last look up Charles Street. We can meet at the train."
The way which she had to travel was a familiar one, but its charm held her—the street lights glimmered pale gold in the early dusk, the crowd swung along in its brisk city manner toward home. Beyond the shops was the Cardinal's house. The Monument topped the hill; to its left the bronze lions guarded the great square; to the right there was the thin spire of the Methodist Church.
She had an hour before train time and she lingered a little, stopping at this window and that, and all the time the money which she had elected to save burned a hole in her pocket.
For there were such things to buy! Passing a flower shop there were violets and roses. Passing a candy shop were chocolates. Passing a hat shop there was a veil flung like a cloud over a celestial chapeau! Passing an Everything-that-is-Lovely shop she saw an enchanting length of silk—as pink as a sea-shell—silk like that which Cynthia Warfield had worn when she sat for the portrait which hung in the library at Crossroads!
