So with the routine, the care of the house and the increasingly interesting children, a month wore on. At the end of the month a letter from Dick came, enclosing a check for her usual allowance. She sent it back with a note which she tried to make not too curt, reiterating that she must live on her own money and that she had plenty. Then she went into her own room and there, with her check book and a pencil, made various budgets to figure out just how she could manage to cut her expenses to a fourth of their usual amount. That, it appeared, must be done--or if not she would have to take money from Dick or her stepfather. She wouldn’t do that, she was resolved. The decision not to take Dick’s money helped her self-respect enormously. If he was not to live with her she was not going to be supported by him. Dick’s incensed, insulted arguments on that point--that he had a right to support his children and that she had no right to prevent him--made no impression on the fixity of her decision. “I couldn’t do it, Dick,” she told him, as they were trying to have a “calm” discussion a few days before he went. “Don’t you see that it would be shameful? You’re getting nothing from me--nothing from the children and there’s something in taking money from a man with whom you aren’t living that puts you in a sordid class.” “But I did get so much--I did get everything----” “You don’t owe anything for that; please don’t drag money into it, Dick. I couldn’t--I couldn’t ever take it. Love is a gift; children are a gift; you can’t settle for them in----” “I’m not trying to,” cried Dick, “but don’t you see that for you and for them to get along without things that they have a right to have is ridiculous!” But she was stubborn. She sent back his first check without an instant’s thought of changing her position, although expenses already were beginning to trouble her. That strength which her mother had known was in her had already begun to bolster up her actions and her resolves. She took counsel with Ellen. “Do you think that if I did the upstairs work and took all the care of the children we could get along with just you and a laundress? Now that the family is smaller and since we shall be very quiet we might be able to manage it, don’t you think so?” “I’d be glad,” said Ellen. “There’s not so much work as there used to be and now that you are taking so much care of the babies those nurses have time heavy on their hands.” So the nurse and the housemaid problem was solved for Cecily by her getting along without them and the extra activity which was necessary for her helped her to fill many hours which might have been terribly disconsolate. That saved a hundred dollars a month for her.