Families -- Fiction; Finance, Personal -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction
Nancy's cheeks burned when she remembered something she had innocently
said to Mrs. Fielding, in the early days of their acquaintance. The
fare to the city was seventy cents, and Nancy commented with a sort of
laughing protest upon the quickness with which her mileage books were
exhausted, between the boys' dentist appointments, shopping trips, the
trips twice a month that helped to keep Agnes and Dora happy, and the
occasional dinner and theatre party she herself had with Bert.
"Besides that," she smiled ruefully, "There's the cab fare to the
station, that wretched Kilroy charges fifty cents each way, even for
Anne, and double after ten o'clock at night, so that it almost pays Mr.
Bradley and myself to stay in town!"
"I never go in the train, I don't believe I've ever made the trip that
way," said Mrs. Fielding pleasantly. And immediately she added, "Thorn
has nothing to do, and it saves me any amount of fatigue, having him
follow me about!"
"But what do you do with the car, if you stay in for the theatre?"
Nancy asked, a day or two later, after she and Bert had made some
calculations as to the expense of this.
"Oh, Thorn leaves it in some garage, there are lots of them. And he
gets his dinner somewhere, and goes to a show himself, I suppose!" Mrs.
Fielding said. Nancy made no answer, but when she and Bert were next
held on a Fifth Avenue crossing, she spoke of it again. Hundreds of men
and women younger than Nancy and Bert were sitting in that river of
motor-cars--how easily for granted they seemed to feel them!
"Just as I am beginning to take my lovely husband and children, and my
beautiful home for granted," Nancy said sensibly, giving herself a
little shake. "We have too much now, and here I am wondering what it
would be like to have a motor-car!"
And the next day she spoke carelessly at the club of the smaller
bathhouses.
"This is a wonderful bath house of yours, Mrs. Ingram; but aren't there
smaller ones?"
Mrs. Ingram, a distinguished-looking, plain woman of forty, with the
pleasantest smile in the world, turned quickly from the big dressing
room she had just engaged, and was inspecting.
"Yes, there are, Mrs. Bradley, they're in that little green row, right
against the wall of the garages. We had to have them, you know, for the
children, and a bachelor or two, who couldn't use a big one, and then
of course the maids love to go in, in the mornings--my boys used one
until last year, preferred it!"
And she smiled at the two tall boys in crumpled linen, who were testing
the pegs and investigating the advantages of the room. Nancy had meant
to be firm about that bathhouse, but she did not feel quite equal to it
at this moment. She allowed her fancy to play for one delightful minute
with the thought of a big dressing room; the one right next to Mrs.
Ingram's, with the green awning!
"But twenty dollars a season is an outrageous rent for a bathhouse!"
she said to Bert that night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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