I wish you could see Miss Thorne's fall dresses that she showed me
last year when she was visiting here. She had six gowns, and no one of
them could have cost less than seventy or eighty dollars, and some of
them must have been even more expensive; and yet I don't doubt that this
fall she will feel that she must have just as many more. She runs
through and wears out these expensive things, with all their velvet and
thread lace, just as I wear my commonest ones; and at the end of the
season they are really gone,--spotted, stained, frayed, the lace all
pulled to pieces,--nothing left to save or make over. I feel as if
Jennie and I were patterns of economy, when I see such things. I really
don't know what economy is. What is it?"
"There is the same difficulty in my housekeeping," said my wife. "I
think I am an economist. I mean to be one. All our expenses are on a
modest scale, and yet I can see much that really is not strictly
necessary; but if I compare myself with some of my neighbors, I feel as
if I were hardly respectable. There is no subject on which all the world
are censuring one another so much as this.
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