And Susan and Martha sat upstairs and made the tiers.
Mr. Josselyn was a book-keeper, with a salary of eighteen hundred
dollars, and these seven children. And Susan and Martha were girls of
fair culture, and womanly tastes, and social longings. How does this
seem to you, young ladies, and what do you think of their upstairs life
together, you who calculate, if you calculate at all, whether five
hundred dollars may carry you respectably through your half-dozen city
assemblies, where you shine in silk and gossamer, of which there will
not be "a dress in the room that cost less than seventy-five dollars,"
and come home, after the dance, "a perfect rag"?
Two years ago, when you were perhaps performing in tableaux for the
"benefit of the Sanitary," these two girls had felt the great enthusiasm
of the time lay hold of them in a larger way. Susan had a friend--a dear
old intimate of school-days, now a staid woman of eight-and-twenty--who
was to go out in yet maturer companionship into the hospitals. And
Susan's heart burned to go. But there were all the little tiers, and the
ABC's, and the faces and fingers.
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