The concluding paragraph of the letter merely described the writer's own daily round, especially touching on the dull walks, so rarely broken by a familiar face, which remained almost her only form of recreation. Here Angela decided to put in one sentence in a less reserved vein, which she did: "Well, Tommy, if you mean to make any thank-offerings to 'the poor' this Christmas, you know where they will be _most appreciated_!" But, as she loved her brother devotedly, it was also natural for her to return to a sweet and generous note in farewell: "For your sake, Tommy, I am glad you aren't here, with all the trials and hardships, but out in the world having a happy life of your own!" The completion, stamping, and sending-off of the letter to Tommy left Angela with a sense of definite accomplishment. It was as if something pleasant had happened in the family at last, or at least was going to happen very soon. Unfortunately, however, this agreeable feeling, having such small relation to reality, was born but to sicken and die. Time proceeded with no pleasanter happenings than before, and a letter from Daniel Jenney, of Mitchellton--whose ring had caused the trouble--became a positive event. By now, no doubt, the first natural excitement of "going to the city" to live had subsided. Enthusiastic anticipations had been rubbed bare by hard actuality, poverty, Finchmans, and so on. By this time also the young home-maker had systematized her housekeeping, as she herself said, and commonly ordered from butcher and grocer by means of Mrs. Doremus's telephone, three doors away. With experience, too, Angela had cut down the daily area of cleaning and polishing, from her first youthful excesses. Small incentive there was to rub your fingers to the bone on a house which was hopeless from the start, and which practically nobody but her mother's sad friends ever set foot in. Thus--and also through the all but eccentric indifference of the men of her family to beauty and charm--Angela had more time than ever for thinking. And the more she thought, the more clearly she saw that social progress in a strange city was solely a matter of what might be called favorable self-advertisement, and that this sort of advertisement, in her case at least, was solely a matter of just a little money. But where was money to come from? Little could be expected from Tommy, even at the best. As for the housekeeping allowance (on which home-makers properly rely for some personal "pickings"), that held out, alas, yet frailer hopes. So closely had her father and mother calculated the budget, indeed, that in three months she had squeezed but five dollars and a half out of it: this, though she had early investigated the cheaper cuts of meat and learned the desirability of never paying cash. "Oh," thought the girl, again and again,--"if father'd _only_ get some patients!"