The next two weeks were busy ones for all the Brown household: first and foremost, the ever-crying need of clothes to be answered; second, the old house to be put in apple-pie order; all the furniture rubbed and rubbed some more; the beautiful old floors waxed and polished until they shone and reflected the newly scrubbed white paint in a way Judy thought most romantic. (But Judy thought everything was romantic those days.) She was “itching to help,” and help she did in many ways. Molly would not let her rub furniture or wax floors, but she had the pleasure of hanging the freshly laundered curtains all over the house, and she was received with joy in the sewing room by Miss Lizzie Monday, the neighborhood seamstress. Miss Lizzie was of the opinion that the Browns thought entirely too much about food and not nearly enough about clothes. Indeed it was a failing of the mother, if failing she had, to have good food, no matter at what cost, and then, since strict economy had to be practiced somewhere, to practice it on the clothes. Miss Lizzie had once been present when they were packing a box to send to Molly at Wellington, and had sadly remarked: “In these hard times, with the price of food what it is, poor little raggedy Molly could have had an entire new outfit from the contents of that box.” Mrs. Brown had indignantly denied that she was spending any money at all on the box, but the fact remained in Miss Lizzie’s mind that the food in the delightful box, so eagerly looked for by the hungry college girls, represented so much money that had much better be put on Molly’s outside than her inside. “Not that much of it goes on her own inside. I know Molly too well, bless her heart. Can’t I just see her handing out that good old ham and hickory-nut cake and Rosemary pickle to those Yankees? And they, raised on pale, pink, ready-cooked ham and doughnuts and corner grocery dill pickles, don’t know what they are getting. Molly, in her same old blue that I have made over twice for her!—and that ham would have bought the stuff for a new one (not that I would have had it anything but blue). The half gallon of Rosemary pickle would have trimmed it nicely, and the hickory-nut cake would have made her at least two new shirtwaists, and the express on the box would more than pay me for making the things.”