They both were destined to learn how it was managed, and being young
and healthy and in love, they learned easily, and with much laughter
and delight. Bert's share was perhaps the easier, for although he
manfully walked to his office, polished his own shoes, and ate a
tiresome and unsatisfying lunch five days a week, he had his reward on
the sixth and seventh days, when Nancy petted and praised him.
Her part was harder. She never knew what it was to be free from
financial concern. She fretted and contrived until the misspending of
five cents seemed a genuine calamity to her, She walked to cheap
markets, and endured the casual scorn of cheap clerks. She ironed
Bert's ties and pressed his trousers, saving car fares by walking,
saving hospitality by letting her old friends see how busy and absorbed
she was, saving food by her native skill and ingenuity.
But they lived royally, every meal was a triumph, every hour strangely
bright. Of cooking meat, especially the more choice cuts, Nancy did
little this year, but there was no appetizing combination of
vegetables, soups, salads, hot breads, and iced drinks that she did not
try. Bert said, and he meant it, that he had never lived so well in his
life, and certainly the walls of the little apartment in the "George
Eliot" were packed with joy. When their microscopic accounts balanced
at the end of the week, they celebrated with a table-d'hote dinner down
town--dinners from which they walked home gloriously happy, Nancy
wondering over and over again HOW the restaurateurs could manage it,
Bert, over his cigar, estimating carefully: "Well, Sweet, there wasn't
much cost to that soup, delicious as it was, and I suppose they buy
that sole down at the docks, in the early morning..."
When Nancy had learned that she could live without a telephone, and had
cut down the milk bill, and limited Bert to one butter ball per meal,
she found she could manage easily. In August they gave two or three
dinners, and Nancy displayed her pretty table furnishings to "the
girls," and gave them the secret of her iced tea. She told her husband
that they got along because he was "so wonderful"; she felt that no
financial tangle could resist Bert's neatly pencilled little
calculations, but Bert praised only her--what credit to him that he did
not complain, when he was the most fortunate man in the world?
They came to be proud of their achievement. Nancy had Buckley Pearsall,
Bert's chief, and his wife, to dinner, and kindly Mrs. Pearsall could
not enough praise the bride and her management. Later the Pearsalls
asked the young Bradleys down to their Staten Island home for a
week-end. "And think of the pure gain of not buying a thing for three
days!" exulted Nancy, thereby convulsing her lord. She brought back
late corn, two jars of Mrs. Pearsall's preserved peaches, a great box
of grapes to be made into jelly, and a basket of tomatoes. Bert said
that she was a grafter, but he knew as well as she that Nancy's
pleasure in taking the gifts had given Mrs. Pearsall a genuine joy.
With none of the emergencies they had dreaded, and with many and
unexpected pleasures, the first winter went by. Sometimes Bert got a
theatre pass, sometimes old friends or kinspeople came to town, and
Bert and Nancy went to one of the big hotels to dinner, and stared
radiantly about at the bright lights, and listened to music again, and
were whirled home in a taxicab.
"That party cost your Cousin Edith about twenty-five dollars," Nancy,
rolling up her hair-net thoughtfully, would say late at night, with a
suppressed yawn. "The dinner check was fourteen, and the tickets
eight--it cost her more than twenty-five dollars! Doesn't that seem
wicked, Bert? And all that delicious chicken that we hardly
touched--dear me, what fun I could have with twenty-five dollars! There
are so many things I'd like to buy that I never do; just silly things,
you know--nice soaps and powders, and fancy cheeses and an alligator
pear, and the kind of toilet water you love so--don't you remember you
bought it in Boston when we honeymooned?"
Perhaps a shadow would touch Bert's watching face, and he would come to
put an arm about her and her loosened cloud of hair.
"Poor old girl, it isn't much fun for you! Do you get tired of it,
Nancy?"
"Bert," she said, one night in a mood of gravity and confidence that he
loved, and had learned to watch for, "I never get tired. And sometimes
I feel sure that the most wonderful happiness that ever is felt in this
world comes to two people who love each other, and who have to make
sacrifices for each other! I mean that. I mean that I don't think
riches, or travel, or great gifts and achievements bring a greater
happiness than ours. I think a king, dying," smiled Nancy, trying not
to be too serious, "might wish that, for a while at least, he had been
able to wear shabby shoes for the woman he loved, and had had years of
poking about a great city with her, and talking and laughing and
experimenting and working over their problem together!"
Bert kissed the thoughtful eyes, but did not speak.
"But just the same," Nancy presently went on, "sometimes I do get--just
a little frightened. I feel as if perhaps we had been a little too
brave. When your cousins, and mine, ask us how we do it, and make so
much of it, it makes me feel a little uneasy. Suppose we really aren't
able to swing it ...?"
Bert knew how to meet this mood, and he never failed her. He put his
arm about her, tonight, and gave her his sunniest smile.
"We could pay less rent, dear."
This fired Nancy. Of course they could. She had seen really possible
places, in inaccessible neighbourhoods, which rented far more
reasonably. She had seen quite sunny and clean flats for as little as
fourteen and sixteen dollars a month. Her housekeeping abilities
awakened to the demand. What did she and Bert care about neighbourhoods
and the casual dictates of fashion? They were a world in themselves,
and they needed no other company.
"Everyone said that we'd never get this far," Bert reminded her
hearteningly. She was immediately reassured, and fell to enthusiastic
planning for Christmas.