"And the next item I suppose should be Clothes."
"Yes, it ought to be, but here is a difficulty. The first year you are married the sum will fall way below the average, for your two trousseaux will supply your needs. Suppose this time you put down $150, just to have something to go by; it will be at least double that, possibly, after awhile. Now if you will add up what you have there you can tell what you will have for the most important item of all, Incidentals, which we have left for the last."
Dolly added in silence for a moment, and then read:
"Or, say $1,200; that, subtracted from what I hope will be our income, $1,800, leaves $600 for Incidentals."
"And that is very much like a skeleton in the closet. Incidentals, my dear Dolly, are the very worst foe of all young housekeepers. I wish I could impress upon you from the very first to watch that column. It must cover everything we have not put down, and the name of them is Legion. Doctor's bills, dentist's bills, church, books, magazines, car-fares, entertaining, pocket money of every sort, gas bills, – unless you can get those out of your table allowance, as possibly you can, and perhaps you can not, – and vacations, and amusements, and two things that ought to come first of all, and you must never, never forget or treat lightly – life insurance and the savings bank account."
"Really, Mary, you frighten me!"
"You may well think of these things seriously at least, because they need that sort of consideration. Six hundred dollars is very little for all those items, and yet it must cover them. Life insurance is a necessity; don't ever think you can dispense with that, but keep your premiums paid up if you have to live on bread and water to do it. And the savings bank; into that must – must, Dolly – go a small sum every single month. Nothing makes one feel so at peace with all the world as to know that there is a small but growing sum laid by for the rainy day which is absolutely sure to come just when you can least endure it. Think what it means to have something to fall back on in a great emergency! It is so fatally easy to forget about that and all these other things which devour that sum under Incidentals, and then, behold, the end of July finds one with the next December's money all spent! Candy and flowers and theatre tickets and other nice but unnecessary things will behave in just exactly that way; they will simply devour Incidentals."
"Well, I'll try and keep a stern and watchful eye on the column," said Dolly, "and when Fred's salary is raised we will go on living at exactly the same rate as before and spend all the new margin on luxuries; I do love luxuries!"
"They certainly are pleasant, but if you want a mind at ease, keep your attention firmly fixed on your account in the savings bank. That in the long run gives greater satisfaction than candy or violets, though I don't dispute that they have their place, too. But cheer up! Housekeeping always gets simpler the farther you get along, and the day will come when you won't know that you are economizing, it will be so easy and natural and pleasant."
Dolly sighed heavily as she added Incidentals on to her other items and made her column under Income come out neatly, $1,800 received, and $1,800 spent.
"I hope you will hurry up and teach me everything as fast as possible," she said. "It does seem rather impossible to me, after all, and I started off this morning so sure that I could do it offhand! I feel exactly as though I had a lesson to learn made up of a mixture of Sanscrit and German philosophy and trigonometry, and all the rest of the most dreadful things you can think of."
CHAPTER II
Saving for Staples – The Kitchen – Buying – Linen
The very next day the two lady-maids went seriously to work on their problem of living on a little. They arranged for a woman to come one day in the week and wash, do a little cleaning for perhaps an hour while the wash was drying, and then iron the heavy things; the next morning the sisters were to finish up the light and dainty things left over, the napkins, pretty waists, handkerchiefs, and odds and ends; these would take only an hour or two after the regular routine of bed-making, dusting, and brushing up the hardwood floors was out of the way, and this in their small, convenient apartment was no great task.
After everything was in order, they sat down with books and pencils to lay out a sort of campaign for the winter.
"I said we would allow ourselves about seven dollars a week for food," Mrs. Thorne began. "Please notice that I said about. It is really impossible to be absolutely exact with you, because you are not sure just where you are going to live. If you are in the country proper, or possibly even in a suburb, you will find food somewhat less than in the city; milk, eggs, and vegetables are almost always cheaper there than they are here. Then, too, prices differ in different places, sometimes without any apparent reason. So we won't be absolutely bound down to seven dollars a week; sometimes we will spend only six, and once in awhile we may go a little over our allowance, though I plan never to do that.
"Now out of this dollar a day we must buy meat, vegetables, groceries, milk, butter, and eggs, so you see we shall have to be very careful indeed and very saving, especially as we must have a little margin every week to put in some staple. One week we will lay in half a barrel of potatoes, if we find some that are cheap just then; another, we will buy olive oil, or fruit for preserving, or flour, or something for our emergency closet; all these things must be taken into account, you see, if we are not going to get into deep water financially. Just fancy! We might spend our dollar a day right along, and some morning wake up to find ourselves flourless, sugarless, coffeeless, and no money in our purse but the one dollar for the one day! No, the only safe way is to put in staples as we go along, and so never get out of everything at once.
"You see that tin bank on the kitchen mantel: every day when I come back from market I put in that all the pennies and nickels I have left; then some days, when I have spent only about fifty cents down-town, because we had so much in the house in the way of left-overs that I did not need to get much of anything, I put in all of the dollar that I have left, – perhaps forty cents or so. You can see that I always have enough for our needs right there without drawing on our future.
"And then besides staples there is entertaining to save for. Half the fun of keeping house is having one's friends in to a meal now and then. I just love to give dinner-parties."
"But I thought we allowed for that," said Dolly, turning over the leaves of her book. "You certainly said Entertaining came under Incidentals; see, here it is in black and white."
"So I did, but by that I meant really serious entertaining, which comes only once in awhile, such as a big family dinner at Christmas, with a fourteen-pound turkey or some similar extravagance. If we undertook any such affair as that I should unhesitatingly take out its cost from Incidentals, because otherwise we should be on short rations ourselves for far too long a time to be comfortable, in order to make things come out even; but now I am speaking of little dinners and luncheons when we have four people at a time. Those I hope to get out of our regular allowance; that is what I want a good margin for. And we can do it all, too; even with meat and vegetables at the frightful price they have reached to-day, it's quite possible, if you know how to manage. Other people do it, and we can, too. 'What man has done,' you know."
Dolly groaned.
"I'm perfectly sure I had better cable to Fred to-day that I have decided we can never be married at all," she declared, dismally. "The longer I think about the matter the more certain I am that seven dollars a week is nothing, absolutely nothing. Why, the last winter we kept house mother went off for a week, and I did the ordering; and I remember the meat bill alone for father, Cousin Marion, myself, and three maids was twenty-eight dollars. Father did not say anything when it came in, and did not seem surprised, and I would not have thought that there was anything strange about it except for a remark mother made when she came back and looked over the accounts. 'Well,' she said, 'I do hope you won't marry a poor man; if you do, I'm sorry for him in advance!' From which I argued that poor people did not spend twenty-eight dollars a week on meat, – not as a general thing!"
"I suppose you had sweetbreads for luncheon