I had been reflecting in the brief interval between my wife’s first and second replies that, in the happy event of our imitating Rogers’s example from this time forth and forever more, I should be able to lay up over five thousand dollars a year, and that five thousand dollars a year saved for ten years would be fifty thousand dollars--a very neat little financial nest egg. But Barbara’s second reply upset my calculation utterly, and threw the responsibility of failure on me into the bargain. “Mr. Rogers is the salt of the earth, a highly respectable man and, if I am not mistaken, the deacon of a church,” I remarked not altogether relevantly. “Why should we spend four times as many thousand dollars a year as he?” “I wonder,” answered my wife, “if you really do appreciate how your friend Mr. Rogers lives. I am quite aware that you are talking now for effect--talking through your hat as the children say--because it’s the first of the month and you’re annoyed that the bills are worse than ever, and I understand that you don’t for one moment seriously entertain the hope that our establishment can be conducted on the same basis as his. But I should just like to explain to you for once how people who have only twenty-two hundred dollars a year and are the salt of the earth do live, if only to convince you that the sooner we stop comparing ourselves with them the better. I say ‘we’ because in my moments of depression over the household expenses I catch myself doing the same thing. Our butcher’s bill for this month is huge, and when you came in I was in the throes of despair over a letter in the newspaper from a woman who contends that a good housekeeper in modest circumstances can provide an excellent dinner for her family of six persons, including soup, fish, an entrée, meat, pudding, dessert, and coffee, for fifty-three cents. And she gives the dinner, which at first sight takes one’s breath away. But after you prune it of celery, parsley, salted peanuts, raisins, red cabbage, salad, and cheese, all there is left is bean-soup, cod sounds, fried liver, hot gingerbread, and apples.” “I should dine down town, if you set such repasts before me,” I answered.