[285]CHAPTER XXVIIFINANCE AND FASHION“‘Two added to one, if that could be done,’It said, ‘with one’s fingers and thumbs,’Recollecting with tears how in earlier yearsIt had taken no pains with its sums.”“Really, thisistiresome,” said Mrs. Wise; “I asked Dolly to make a plum-pudding, as Mary was so busy, and she has put currants and sugar and eggs and peel and suet, and no flour or bread-crumbs at all. Where is she, Phyl?”“Four and four and sevenpence-halfpenny, four and elevenpence-halfpenny, minus threepence for stamps,” said Phyl, waving a financial pen to excuse immediate reply; “gone to the post, I think, mither dear; she’s mad after a letter, though I don’t know why. Oh, these wretched accountswon’tcome right.”“Here, I suppose I’ll have to lend a hand,” said Clif, from the lounge where he was stretched smoking and reading, for the afternoon was the pleasant, leisure one of Saturday.He made a lazy way across the room to where[286]Phyl, housekeeper for the week, was wrestling with the accounts. She and Dolly were supposed to take the management of the house alternate weeks for necessary domestic education.“Look,” said Phyl, “I have got everything down quite plainly,—just run your eye down that column, Clif, and see what you make.”“Which column?” said Clif, taking a sheet covered with hieroglyphics and rough writing.“Don’t tease,” Phyl said. “It’s quite plain, Clif; there, the middle one,—oh, it goes over that side too, and just add on those items in the left-hand corner, I had forgotten them before. I’m eight and ninepence short somehow.”“How much did you start with?” Clif said, and made a really heroic effort to disentangle the confusion.“Oh, that’s on the right-hand side,” Phyl said. “There was the ordinary four pounds for the bills, and then four and eightpence extra because Mary forgot to pay the baker’s bill and gave it back to me, and one and six Ted had borrowed, and minus two shillings mother took out for Freddie’s shoes mending,—oh, but she gave me a shilling of it back, so put plus a shilling more, Clif.”“Whoa—steady!” said Clif, figuring away,—“never mind ‘minusing’—just give me your assets.”He found the total came to £4 5s.8d.“Now for the items of expenditure,” he said, and attacked the wild sheet.[287]“Butcher, twelve and nine,” said Phyl’s statement. Then in brackets against this was the note [“but it really is only eleven and eight, because chops were ordered on Monday, not steak”]. “Baker, four and two, and four and eight from last week. Greengrocer, five and ninepence halfpenny, and a shilling for bananas from a boy at the door on Friday, and fourpence for Freddie to get water-melon for his lunch; total therefore for greengrocer, 6s.1½d.”“Well, there’s a shilling wrong there, my beautiful girl,” Clif said, making the correction; and Phyl wrote on a scrap of paper with relief, “Only 7s.8½d.short.”Wages, Milk, Butter, Ice, Grocer,—Clif unravelled their totals from the mass of notes and set them down in a column. “I get it to make four pounds three and twopence,” he said.He compared it with Phyl’s total which said, “Four pounds four and twopence minus sixpence Richie borrowed and two shillings deposit on Weenie’s railway-ticket and two and six of my own money because the iceman had no change and I borrowed sixpence from the Fines Box for a poor man at the door. Therefore, total is four pounds four and eight, and owing still to me is two and six, and owing to the Fines Box sixpence.”No wonder Phyl looked harassed.“You see,” she said, “I ought to have one and sixpence change; that’s plain, isn’t it?”“I’ve seen plainer things,” said Clif.[288]“Oh,” she said, “I know you think it is a stupid way to do accounts, but I get all wrong if I do them any other way. It’s as clear as anything to me.”Clif expressed admiration for the brain power that could penetrate such a remarkable labyrinth, but Phyl took no notice.“I ought to have one and six over,” she repeated; “and instead of that I’m seven shillings and eightpence-halfpenny short. . . . I’ve not paid the butter, and there’s my own halfcrown, and sixpence to be returned to the Red Box.”“Where’s your purse?” Clif said, and Phyl produced the bulky housekeeping money-holder. There were receipts in it, little lists of “Wanteds” from the grocer, a poem or two cut out from magazines, and a review or two of their own little paper, now dead from want of funds. Clif passed these over and searched the middle compartment that contained four stamps, two shirt-buttons, sixpence, and the butter bill wrapped up with four and sixpence inside it. Phyl pounced joyfully on this. “I’d forgotten I’d paid that,” she said. “I missed the man on Monday, and wrapped it up, and then must have paid out of that sovereign. Oh, it’ll come out right now.”Clif calculated rapidly again.“We’ve got about two and tenpence too much now,” he said, and the wrestling began again.“Well, may I speak now?” said Mrs. Wise, who had[289]gone on sewing while the statement of accounts was involving undivided attention.Phyl leaned back and gave her mother an impulsive kiss. “What a patient little woman it is!” she said; “sometimes, Clif, when all of you are away she has a dreadful time of it. I know she is often dying to tell us something, but when she sees we are writing she bottles it all up and tip-toes away again.”“And then I forget,” said Mrs. Wise plaintively. “I’ll have to invest in a phonograph, for sometimes it is a most interesting and important thing I have wanted to say.”“We do let you talk at lunch,” Phyl said kindly; “at least, almost always.”Mrs. Wise said the amendment was necessary. “They drag their characters to table with them sometimes, Clif,” she said, “and I eat my tomato-toast or scrambled egg to the accompaniment of a discussion as to whether chloral would kill instantly and painlessly; or if snake poison, injected hypodermically, would be a surer and swifter death.”“Poor old mother!” Clif said. “There you are, Phyllida, my Phyllida,—one and six to the good. It’s always the way, Mater; she has the right change every time, but how she gets it beats me.”Phyl thankfully put all her papers and boxes away. “My beautiful youth,” she said, “this is nothing to the elaborate system we used to pursue when we were small. Do you remember, mother, when you first gave[290]us an allowance of two shillings a week each, and we had to buy all our little things out of it?”“I do,” said Mrs. Wise, and ran a tuck with smiling recollection. “How many match-boxes used you to have each?”“Seven, I think,” said Phyl thoughtfully. “Let me see: there were gloves, handkerchiefs, stockings, hair-ribbons, charity, pocket-money, and books. We used to apportion our income into twopences and fourpences, with the exception of hair-ribbons, for which we only laid aside one penny a week. Gloves were half-a-crown for best ones and a shilling for school ones, and, oh dear! how long it took to accumulate enough in twopences to buy a pair! We should have considered it a reckless and dishonest proceeding to apply stocking-money to glove purposes; and as to buying a hair-ribbon with the twopences that were lying waiting a charity call—why, we would almost as soon have stolen the money from your purse, mother.”Mrs. Wise was regarding her daughter critically. “I think some money needs stealing from my purse at present,” she said. “Are you bankrupt, Phyl, that you are wearing that old blue serge this afternoon?”Phyl coloured a little.“It really takes too long to be always changing your dress,” she said; “once a day is quite enough, I think, unless one is going out. Anything more is vanity.”Mrs. Wise’s eyes were still busy. Phyl’s collar was[291]almost carefully awry; her hair, upon which she usually bestowed a good deal of attention, was done up in any fashion. The mother remembered too seeing Dolly go out also in her plain morning frock, and without any of the little prettinesses of which both girls were so fond.Phyl coloured again under the quiet scrutiny. “Well, really, mother, it’s all very well for girls who have nothing else to do to make themselves look nice,” she said, “but it is too much waste of time when one has work to do.”Then Clif laughed out—a great roar of laughter. “Don’t you see what it is, Mater,” he said; “it’s the trail of Miss Phillipson. These little donkeys think because they too waste good ink, they ought to look slovenly, and pitchfork their clothes on them like that sweet creature does.”Then Mrs. Wise looked enlightened and also very determined. The girls had become acquainted with a woman journalist, a clever, really excellent woman, but one entirely devoid of any personal vanity. Ted said he was convinced she only did her hair once a month, used her hat for a pillow, and fashioned her dresses out of old bagging. Phyl and Dolly, full of admiration for her powers, suddenly felt themselves conceited little butterflies to be so fond of pretty, fresh muslins and chiffon daintinesses and well-fitting shoes and gloves. They began to think it necessary to live up to their profession, and hence that careless collar and unchanged frock.[292]But the mother nipped the weakness ruthlessly, and for so gentle a woman was quite scathing. The daintiest, most particular of her sex herself, she had absolutely no tolerance for untidy, slip-shod women; it was quite a creed with her that every girl should make the best of her appearance, and that too little thought for clothes was even worse than too much. The very poorest, she used to say, in these days of cheap prints and materials, need never be other than fresh and neat.“You may march yourself straight up-stairs, my lady,” she said, “and do your hair again, and put on your pink blouse, and see your collar meets exactly and precisely under your chin. And when Dolly comes in she may do just the same. If I see any more of this, I shall treat you as if you were in pinafores, and dress you myself.”Phyl retired. Her mother in that attitude was not to be gainsaid, and there was no doubt the fit and delicate tint of the pink cambric blouse afforded her vanquished spirit some consolation as she put it on.She did her hair in the more elaborate fashion, brushed every speck of dust from her skirt, and descended again.“I don’t a bit like to own it,”she said, “but I must say I feel sprucer, body and soul, than I did before. I believe, after all, one would begin to think and act in a slip-shod fashion if one dressed slip-shoddily.”[293]Mrs. Wise smiled approval. “I am convinced no woman ever committed suicide,” she said, “just after a cold bath, or while she was wearing a freshly-got-up blouse—especially if it was of really pretty material.”“Whoa there! Here’s copy going to waste,” said Clif. “Where’s your note-book, Phillipina? ‘Clean Boiled Clothes as a Preventive of Crime.’ There’s a subject made to your hand. Any suggestions to offer as to material, Mater? Would you say, for instance, muslin would ward off Melancholia, or calico Kleptomania?”Mrs. Wise laughed. “I can give you a headline, though, for the article,” she said, “and from our wise old Wendell Holmes. ‘Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality; the highest fashion is intensely alive.’”Phyl chuckled. “Then I shall invest in green leather shoes and green Suède gloves,” she said. “I saw in a paper they were the dominant note in Paris fashions.”“Here comes Dolichus,” said Clif. “Get your breath up, Mater; you’ll have to deliver your peroration again; she has the same frock on that she wore at breakfast.”But Dolly was wearing it even when she went to bed, and no one had said her nay.
“‘Two added to one, if that could be done,’It said, ‘with one’s fingers and thumbs,’Recollecting with tears how in earlier yearsIt had taken no pains with its sums.”
“‘Two added to one, if that could be done,’It said, ‘with one’s fingers and thumbs,’Recollecting with tears how in earlier yearsIt had taken no pains with its sums.”
“‘Two added to one, if that could be done,’It said, ‘with one’s fingers and thumbs,’Recollecting with tears how in earlier yearsIt had taken no pains with its sums.”
“‘Two added to one, if that could be done,’
It said, ‘with one’s fingers and thumbs,’
Recollecting with tears how in earlier years
It had taken no pains with its sums.”
“Really, thisistiresome,” said Mrs. Wise; “I asked Dolly to make a plum-pudding, as Mary was so busy, and she has put currants and sugar and eggs and peel and suet, and no flour or bread-crumbs at all. Where is she, Phyl?”
“Four and four and sevenpence-halfpenny, four and elevenpence-halfpenny, minus threepence for stamps,” said Phyl, waving a financial pen to excuse immediate reply; “gone to the post, I think, mither dear; she’s mad after a letter, though I don’t know why. Oh, these wretched accountswon’tcome right.”
“Here, I suppose I’ll have to lend a hand,” said Clif, from the lounge where he was stretched smoking and reading, for the afternoon was the pleasant, leisure one of Saturday.
He made a lazy way across the room to where[286]Phyl, housekeeper for the week, was wrestling with the accounts. She and Dolly were supposed to take the management of the house alternate weeks for necessary domestic education.
“Look,” said Phyl, “I have got everything down quite plainly,—just run your eye down that column, Clif, and see what you make.”
“Which column?” said Clif, taking a sheet covered with hieroglyphics and rough writing.
“Don’t tease,” Phyl said. “It’s quite plain, Clif; there, the middle one,—oh, it goes over that side too, and just add on those items in the left-hand corner, I had forgotten them before. I’m eight and ninepence short somehow.”
“How much did you start with?” Clif said, and made a really heroic effort to disentangle the confusion.
“Oh, that’s on the right-hand side,” Phyl said. “There was the ordinary four pounds for the bills, and then four and eightpence extra because Mary forgot to pay the baker’s bill and gave it back to me, and one and six Ted had borrowed, and minus two shillings mother took out for Freddie’s shoes mending,—oh, but she gave me a shilling of it back, so put plus a shilling more, Clif.”
“Whoa—steady!” said Clif, figuring away,—“never mind ‘minusing’—just give me your assets.”
He found the total came to £4 5s.8d.“Now for the items of expenditure,” he said, and attacked the wild sheet.
[287]“Butcher, twelve and nine,” said Phyl’s statement. Then in brackets against this was the note [“but it really is only eleven and eight, because chops were ordered on Monday, not steak”]. “Baker, four and two, and four and eight from last week. Greengrocer, five and ninepence halfpenny, and a shilling for bananas from a boy at the door on Friday, and fourpence for Freddie to get water-melon for his lunch; total therefore for greengrocer, 6s.1½d.”
“Well, there’s a shilling wrong there, my beautiful girl,” Clif said, making the correction; and Phyl wrote on a scrap of paper with relief, “Only 7s.8½d.short.”
Wages, Milk, Butter, Ice, Grocer,—Clif unravelled their totals from the mass of notes and set them down in a column. “I get it to make four pounds three and twopence,” he said.
He compared it with Phyl’s total which said, “Four pounds four and twopence minus sixpence Richie borrowed and two shillings deposit on Weenie’s railway-ticket and two and six of my own money because the iceman had no change and I borrowed sixpence from the Fines Box for a poor man at the door. Therefore, total is four pounds four and eight, and owing still to me is two and six, and owing to the Fines Box sixpence.”
No wonder Phyl looked harassed.
“You see,” she said, “I ought to have one and sixpence change; that’s plain, isn’t it?”
“I’ve seen plainer things,” said Clif.
[288]“Oh,” she said, “I know you think it is a stupid way to do accounts, but I get all wrong if I do them any other way. It’s as clear as anything to me.”
Clif expressed admiration for the brain power that could penetrate such a remarkable labyrinth, but Phyl took no notice.
“I ought to have one and six over,” she repeated; “and instead of that I’m seven shillings and eightpence-halfpenny short. . . . I’ve not paid the butter, and there’s my own halfcrown, and sixpence to be returned to the Red Box.”
“Where’s your purse?” Clif said, and Phyl produced the bulky housekeeping money-holder. There were receipts in it, little lists of “Wanteds” from the grocer, a poem or two cut out from magazines, and a review or two of their own little paper, now dead from want of funds. Clif passed these over and searched the middle compartment that contained four stamps, two shirt-buttons, sixpence, and the butter bill wrapped up with four and sixpence inside it. Phyl pounced joyfully on this. “I’d forgotten I’d paid that,” she said. “I missed the man on Monday, and wrapped it up, and then must have paid out of that sovereign. Oh, it’ll come out right now.”
Clif calculated rapidly again.
“We’ve got about two and tenpence too much now,” he said, and the wrestling began again.
“Well, may I speak now?” said Mrs. Wise, who had[289]gone on sewing while the statement of accounts was involving undivided attention.
Phyl leaned back and gave her mother an impulsive kiss. “What a patient little woman it is!” she said; “sometimes, Clif, when all of you are away she has a dreadful time of it. I know she is often dying to tell us something, but when she sees we are writing she bottles it all up and tip-toes away again.”
“And then I forget,” said Mrs. Wise plaintively. “I’ll have to invest in a phonograph, for sometimes it is a most interesting and important thing I have wanted to say.”
“We do let you talk at lunch,” Phyl said kindly; “at least, almost always.”
Mrs. Wise said the amendment was necessary. “They drag their characters to table with them sometimes, Clif,” she said, “and I eat my tomato-toast or scrambled egg to the accompaniment of a discussion as to whether chloral would kill instantly and painlessly; or if snake poison, injected hypodermically, would be a surer and swifter death.”
“Poor old mother!” Clif said. “There you are, Phyllida, my Phyllida,—one and six to the good. It’s always the way, Mater; she has the right change every time, but how she gets it beats me.”
Phyl thankfully put all her papers and boxes away. “My beautiful youth,” she said, “this is nothing to the elaborate system we used to pursue when we were small. Do you remember, mother, when you first gave[290]us an allowance of two shillings a week each, and we had to buy all our little things out of it?”
“I do,” said Mrs. Wise, and ran a tuck with smiling recollection. “How many match-boxes used you to have each?”
“Seven, I think,” said Phyl thoughtfully. “Let me see: there were gloves, handkerchiefs, stockings, hair-ribbons, charity, pocket-money, and books. We used to apportion our income into twopences and fourpences, with the exception of hair-ribbons, for which we only laid aside one penny a week. Gloves were half-a-crown for best ones and a shilling for school ones, and, oh dear! how long it took to accumulate enough in twopences to buy a pair! We should have considered it a reckless and dishonest proceeding to apply stocking-money to glove purposes; and as to buying a hair-ribbon with the twopences that were lying waiting a charity call—why, we would almost as soon have stolen the money from your purse, mother.”
Mrs. Wise was regarding her daughter critically. “I think some money needs stealing from my purse at present,” she said. “Are you bankrupt, Phyl, that you are wearing that old blue serge this afternoon?”
Phyl coloured a little.
“It really takes too long to be always changing your dress,” she said; “once a day is quite enough, I think, unless one is going out. Anything more is vanity.”
Mrs. Wise’s eyes were still busy. Phyl’s collar was[291]almost carefully awry; her hair, upon which she usually bestowed a good deal of attention, was done up in any fashion. The mother remembered too seeing Dolly go out also in her plain morning frock, and without any of the little prettinesses of which both girls were so fond.
Phyl coloured again under the quiet scrutiny. “Well, really, mother, it’s all very well for girls who have nothing else to do to make themselves look nice,” she said, “but it is too much waste of time when one has work to do.”
Then Clif laughed out—a great roar of laughter. “Don’t you see what it is, Mater,” he said; “it’s the trail of Miss Phillipson. These little donkeys think because they too waste good ink, they ought to look slovenly, and pitchfork their clothes on them like that sweet creature does.”
Then Mrs. Wise looked enlightened and also very determined. The girls had become acquainted with a woman journalist, a clever, really excellent woman, but one entirely devoid of any personal vanity. Ted said he was convinced she only did her hair once a month, used her hat for a pillow, and fashioned her dresses out of old bagging. Phyl and Dolly, full of admiration for her powers, suddenly felt themselves conceited little butterflies to be so fond of pretty, fresh muslins and chiffon daintinesses and well-fitting shoes and gloves. They began to think it necessary to live up to their profession, and hence that careless collar and unchanged frock.
[292]But the mother nipped the weakness ruthlessly, and for so gentle a woman was quite scathing. The daintiest, most particular of her sex herself, she had absolutely no tolerance for untidy, slip-shod women; it was quite a creed with her that every girl should make the best of her appearance, and that too little thought for clothes was even worse than too much. The very poorest, she used to say, in these days of cheap prints and materials, need never be other than fresh and neat.
“You may march yourself straight up-stairs, my lady,” she said, “and do your hair again, and put on your pink blouse, and see your collar meets exactly and precisely under your chin. And when Dolly comes in she may do just the same. If I see any more of this, I shall treat you as if you were in pinafores, and dress you myself.”
Phyl retired. Her mother in that attitude was not to be gainsaid, and there was no doubt the fit and delicate tint of the pink cambric blouse afforded her vanquished spirit some consolation as she put it on.
She did her hair in the more elaborate fashion, brushed every speck of dust from her skirt, and descended again.
“I don’t a bit like to own it,”she said, “but I must say I feel sprucer, body and soul, than I did before. I believe, after all, one would begin to think and act in a slip-shod fashion if one dressed slip-shoddily.”
[293]Mrs. Wise smiled approval. “I am convinced no woman ever committed suicide,” she said, “just after a cold bath, or while she was wearing a freshly-got-up blouse—especially if it was of really pretty material.”
“Whoa there! Here’s copy going to waste,” said Clif. “Where’s your note-book, Phillipina? ‘Clean Boiled Clothes as a Preventive of Crime.’ There’s a subject made to your hand. Any suggestions to offer as to material, Mater? Would you say, for instance, muslin would ward off Melancholia, or calico Kleptomania?”
Mrs. Wise laughed. “I can give you a headline, though, for the article,” she said, “and from our wise old Wendell Holmes. ‘Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality; the highest fashion is intensely alive.’”
Phyl chuckled. “Then I shall invest in green leather shoes and green Suède gloves,” she said. “I saw in a paper they were the dominant note in Paris fashions.”
“Here comes Dolichus,” said Clif. “Get your breath up, Mater; you’ll have to deliver your peroration again; she has the same frock on that she wore at breakfast.”
But Dolly was wearing it even when she went to bed, and no one had said her nay.