Part 40

"But that's impossible. You've no right to live in this small, cramping way. You must broaden out and give him room to grow. . . . Isn't that sensible?"

"It sounds so," she admitted. "But--" She gazed round helplessly--"I'm afraid!"

"Afraid of what?"

"I don't know."

"Then don't bother about it."

"I'll have to be very--careful," she said thoughtfully.

"As you please," replied he. "Only, don't live and think on a ten-dollar-a-week basis. That isn't the way to get on."

He never again brought up the matter in direct form. But most of his conversation was indirect and more or less subtle suggestions as to ways of branching out. She moved cautiously for a few days, then timidly began to spend money.

There is a notion widely spread abroad that people who have little money know more about the art of spending money and the science of economizing than those who have much. It would be about as sensible to say that the best swimmers are those who have never been near the water, or no nearer than a bath tub. Anyone wishing to be convinced need only make an excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage barrels overflowing with spoiled food--or the trashy goods exposed for sale in the shops and the markets. Those who have had money and have lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift. Those who have never had money are almost invariably prodigal--because they are ignorant. When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family had had money. But never since she could remember had they been anything but poor.

She did not know how to spend money. She did not know prices or values--being in that respect precisely like the mass of mankind--and womankind--who imagine they are economical because they hunt so-called bargains and haggle with merchants who have got doubly ready for them by laying in inferior goods and by putting up prices in advance. She knew how much ten dollars a week was, the meaning of the twenty to thirty dollars a week her father had made. But she had only a faint--and exaggeratedly mistaken--notion about sixty-five hundred a year--six and a half thousands. It seemed wealth to her, so vast that a hundred thousand a year would have seemed no more. As soon as she drifted away from the known course--the thirty to forty dollars a week upon which they had been living--Dorothea Hallowell was in a trackless sea, with a broken compass and no chart whatever. A common enough experience in America, the land of sudden changes of fortune, of rosiest hopes about "striking it rich," of carelessness and ignorance as to values, of eager and untrained appetite for luxury and novelty of any and every kind.

At first any expenditure, however small, for the plainest comfort which had been beyond their means seemed a giddy extravagance. But a bank account--and a check book--soon dissipated that nervousness. A few charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing a check, and she was almost at her ease. With people who have known only squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation and slow accumulation, the spreading out process is usually slow--not so slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid. A piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check. With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading is a tropical, overnight affair.

Counting all she spent and arranged to spend in those first few weeks, you had no great total. But it was great for a girl who had been making ten dollars a week. Also there were sown in her mind broadcast and thick the seeds of desire for more luxurious comfort, of need for it, that could never be uprooted.

Norman came over almost every evening. He got a new and youthful and youth-restoring kind of pleasure out of this process of expansion. He liked to hear each trifling detail, and he was always making suggestions that bore immediate fruit in further expenditure. When he again brought up the subject of a larger house, she listened with only the faintest protests. Her ideas of such a short time before seemed small, laughably small now. "Father was worrying only this morning because he is so cramped," she admitted.

"We must remedy that at once," said Norman.

And on the following Sunday he and she went house hunting. They found a satisfactory place--peculiarly satisfactory to Norman because it was near the Hudson tunnel, and so only a few minutes from his office. To Dorothy it loomed a mansion, almost a palace. In fact it was a modestly roomy old-fashioned brick house, with a brick stable at the side that, with a little changing, would make an admirable laboratory.

"You haven't the time--or the experience--to fit this place up," said Norman. "I'll attend to it--that is, I'll have it attended to." Seeing her uneasy expression, he added: "I can get much better terms. They'd certainly overcharge you. There's no sense in wasting money--is there?"

"No," she admitted, convinced.

He gave the order to a firm of decorators. It was a moderate order, considering the amount of work that had to be done. But if the girl had seen the estimates Norman indorsed, she would have been terrified. However, he saw to it that she did not see them; and she, ignorant of values, believed him when he told her the general account of the corporation must be charged with two thousand dollars.

Her alarm took him by surprise. The sum seemed small to him--and it was only about one fifth what the alterations and improvements had cost. Cried she, "Why, that's more than our whole income for a year has been!"

"You are forgetting these improvements add to the value of the property. I've bought it."

That quieted her. "You are sure you didn't pay those decorators and furnishers too much?" said she.

"You don't like their work?" inquired he, chagrined.

"Oh, yes--yes, indeed," she assured him. "I like plain, solid-looking things. But--two thousand dollars is a lot of money."

Norman regretted that, as his whole object had been to please her, he had not ordered the more showy cheaper stuff but had insisted upon the simplest, plainest-looking appointments throughout. Even her bedroom furniture, even her dressing table set, was of the kind that suggests cost only to the experienced, carefully and well educated in values and in taste.

"But I'm sure it isn't fair to charge all these things to the company," she protested. "I can't allow it. Not the things for my personal use."

"You are a fierce watchdog of a treasurer," said Norman, laughing at her but noting and respecting the fine instinct of good breeding shown in her absence of greediness, of desire to get all she could. "But I'm letting the firm of decorators take over what you leave behind in the old house. I'll see what they'll allow for it. Maybe that will cover the expense you object to."

This contented her. Nor was she in the least suspicious when he announced that the decorators had made such a liberal allowance that the deficit was but three hundred dollars. "Those chaps," he explained, "have a wide margin of profit. Besides, they're eager to get more and bigger work from me."

A few weeks, and he was enjoying the sight of her ensconced with her father in luxurious comfort--with two servants, with a well-run house, with pleasant gardens, with all that is at the command of an income of six thousand a year in a comparatively inexpensive city. Only occasionally--and then not deeply--was he troubled by the reflection that he was still far from his goal--and had made apparently absurdly little progress toward it through all this maneuvering. The truth was, he preferred to linger when lingering gave him so many new kinds of pleasure. Of those in the large and motley company that sit down to the banquet of the senses, the most are crude, if not coarse, gluttons. They eat fast and furiously, having a raw appetite. Now and then there is one who has some idea of the art of enjoyment--the art of prolonging and varying both the joys of anticipation and the joys of realization.