“Oh, it’s no matter for the children. You look fagged to death, dear. Send for that girl. Indeed I’d rather give fifty dollars than see you wear yourself out as you do.”
Now, if Coolidge would only have given the fifty, or twenty, or even ten dollars, instead of talking about it, it would have saved his poor wife many a side-ache, and back-ache, and heart-ache to boot, for she almost stitched her soul out to save five dollars. But there was nothing she would not rather do than ask for money. It was bad enough to be obliged to hand the necessary house-bills. As to her own milliner’s and mantua-maker’s accounts! the mental agony she went through for them would have been almost ludicrous, so disproportioned was the amount of suffering to the amount charged, had it not been so sincere.
“Catch me going to Lucy’s again to spend an evening,” said one of her younger sisters to Emily, now the rich and gay Mrs. Woodberry.
“Why? How was it—what was the matter?” asked Emily.
“I am sure I do not know—nothing that I could see. But you would have supposed there was a corpse in the house, certainly. There was but one light, and that shaded, on the table where Lucy and the children sat—she sewing, they studying. And if the poor little souls spoke loud, or laughed, Lucy hushed them at once, and with such reproachful looks, as if they had done something very naughty, and were shockingly unfeeling. And Mr. Coolidge scarcely raised his eyes from his paper, but to say something cross two or three times during the course of the evening. And poor Lucy sat stitching away, looking the image of grief and despair. If both the children had been up stairs dying of scarlet fever, she could not have looked worse. I asked her what was the matter, and she replied, ‘Nothing.’ But, really, if people look so about ‘nothing,’ they deserve to have ‘something’ to look miserable about.”
“I suppose it was some bill or other—the old story,” replied Mrs. Woodberry. “Lucy is so silly to let Coolidge be so cross about things that are no more her fault than his. If she had only fired up in the beginning, and told him, as I should have done, when he scolded about the butcher and baker, &c., ‘That he ate five times as much bread as I did; and as to meat, I did not care if I did not eat a morsel from one week’s end to another,’ and followed it up by ordering no dinner, I think she might have taught him better manners. Men are so detestable,” she continued, with vexation, “one would think it was not enough to be poor, but they must add to the charm by being cross.”
“Then you think poverty a great evil,” said Susan with sorrowful earnestness—for there was a certain young lawyer she thought very captivating.
“An evil—to be sure it is,” replied Mrs. Woodberry, who, being very rich and expensive, thought there was no living without money, and plenty of it, too. “Just look at Lucy—did you ever see such a poor, forlorn, faded, fretful looking thing as she has become. You don’t remember her, Susan, when she married. You would scarcely believe what a sweet, fresh, pretty young creature she was. And now look at her! She looks as if she might have gone in the wash with those poor old faded calicoes of hers, that have been rubbed and pounded till there’s scarce a shade of color in them. And Coolidge, too—what a pleasant, merry, joyous tempered fellow he was. I never shall forget them the first time they appeared in society after their marriage. It was at a Fancy Ball. She went as Titania, he as Bully Bottom. They were the admiration and life of the room. One would not have thought, to have seen them then, how they would look fifteen years later.”
“Well,” said old Mrs. Rutledge, an aunt of the Sutherlands, joining in the conversation for the first time, “there I don’t agree with you, Emily. It was just the beginning that might have foretold the ending.”
“How so?” said both sisters, looking up at once.