“HOW much will a new suit cost, Jo?” Mr. Atwood held his fingers reflectively on the rubber band of his pocketbook as he asked the question, and glanced as he did so at the round brunette face of his wife, which had suddenly become all flush and sparkle.

“Oh, Edward!”

“Well?”

“You oughtn’t to give me the money for it now—you really oughtn’t. There are so many calls on you at this season of the year, I don’t see how we can meet them as it is. The second quarter of Josephine’s music lessons begins next month, and the dancing school bill comes in too—besides the coal. Everything just piles in before Christmas. I meant to have saved the money, for a coat at any rate, this summer out of my allowance, but I was obliged to fit Josephine out from head to foot—she grows so fast, she takes as much for a dress as I do. But it doesn’t make any difference—I can do very well for a while with what I have—really!”

“How about the Washington trip with me next month? I thought you said you couldn’t go anywhere without a new suit?”

“Well, I can’t, but—”

“That settles it.”

Mr. Atwood pulled off the rubber band from the pocketbook and laid it on the table before him, as he extracted a roll of bills and began to count them. It was a shabby article, worn brown at the edges, but it had been made of handsome leather to begin with, and still held together in spite of many years of service. Mrs. Atwood would hardly have known her husband without that pocketbook. It represented in its way the heart of a kind and generous man, always ready to do his utmost in help of the family needs, without complaint or caviling.

His wife always experienced mingled feelings when that leather receptacle appeared—a quick and blessed relief and a sharp wince, as if it were really his heart’s blood that she was taking. Her fervent imagination was perennially ready to picture unknown depths of stress.

He paid no attention now to her inarticulate murmur of protest; but asked, in a business-like way,

“How much will it take?”

“I could get the material for a dollar a yard—” Mrs. Atwood sat with her hands clasped and her eyes looking off into space, feeling the words wrung from her—“I could get it for a dollar a yard, but I suppose it ought to be heavier weight for the winter.”

“Have it warm enough, whatever else you do,” interrupted her husband.

“It would take seven yards, or I might get along with six and a half, it depends on the width. It’s the linings that make it mount up to so much, and the making. You can get a suit made for ten dollars; Cynthia Callender did, and hers looks well, but Mrs. Nichols went to the same place, and—”

“Will thirty dollars be enough?” asked Mr. Atwood with masculine directness, seeking for some tangible fact.

“Oh, yes. I’m sure it will be, I—”

“Then here’s fifty,” said Mr. Atwood. He counted out five tens and pushed them over to her. “Get a good suit while you’re about it, Jo.”

“Oh, Edward. I don’t want—”

“Make her take it,” said a girl of sixteen, rising from the corner where she had been sitting with a book in her hand, a very tall and thin and pretty girl, brunette like her mother, with a long black braid that hung down her back. She came forward and threw her arm around her mother’s neck, bending protectingly over her. “Make her take it, papa. She buys everything for me and the boys, and goes without herself, so that I’m ashamed to walk out in the street with her; it makes me look so horrid to be all dressed up when she wears that old spring jacket. When it’s cold she puts a cape over it. I wish you’d see that cape! She’s had it since the year one. She doesn’t dare wear it when she goes out with you, she just shivers.”

“Hush, hush, Josephine,” said the mother embarrassed, yet laughing, as her husband lifted his shaggy eyebrows at her in mock severity. “You needn’t say any more, either of you. I’ll take the money.” She paused impressively, and then gently pushed the girl aside and went over and kissed her husband.

“If I were only as good a manager as some people! I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I try, and I try, but—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said the husband. “All I ask now is that you spend this money on yourself; it’s not for other needs. Remember! You are to spend it all on yourself.”

“Yes, I will,” said Mrs. Atwood, with the guilty thrill of the perjured at the very moment of her promise. She knew very well that some of it would have to be spent for other needs. She had but fifty cents left of her allowance to last her until the end of the month, five long days away. No one but the mother of a family of moderate means realizes what the demand for pads, pencils, shoestrings, lunches, postage stamps, hair ribbons, medicines, mended shoes, and such like can amount to in that short time. She had meant to ask Edward to advance her a little more on the next month’s allowance—already largely anticipated—but she had not the face to after his generosity to her now. A couple of dollars out of the fifty would make very little difference, and she did not need it all, anyway. She almost wept as she thought of Josephine’s championship of her, and her husband’s thoughtfulness.

Mrs. Atwood adored her husband and her three children. She firmly believed them to be superior in every way to all other mortals; sacrificing service for them was her joy of joys, her keenest affliction the fear that she did not appreciate them half enough. It is certain that the children, truthful, loving, and obedient as they had been trained to be, would have been spoiled beyond tolerance if it were not that the very strength of her admiration made it innocuous. They were so used to being told that they were the loveliest and dearest things on earth that the words were not even heard. As they grew older the extravagance of her devotion was beginning to rouse the protective element in them, to her wonder and humility.

Mrs. Atwood, at twenty, the time of her marriage, had been a warm-hearted, fervent, loquacious, impulsive child. At thirty-eight she was still in many ways the girl her husband had married; even to her looks, while he appeared much older than his real age, in reality but a couple of years ahead of hers. She was always longing to be a silent, noble, and finely-balanced character, quite oblivious of the fact that she suited him, a humorous but self-contained man, exactly as she was, and that he would have been very lonesome with anything more perfect. Perhaps, after all, there are few things that are better to bring into a household than an uncalculating and abounding love, even if the manifestations of it are not always of the wisest.

The extra money cast a rich glow over Mrs. Atwood’s horizon. In the effulgence of it she received a bill for twelve dollars presented to her just after breakfast the next morning, by the waitress, with the word that the man waiting outside the door had already brought it once before, when they were out of town. Could Mrs. Atwood pay it now? He needed the money.

“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with affluent promptness. The bill was for work on the lawn during the summer, something her husband always paid for, but it seemed a pity to have the man go away again when the money was there at hand. She would not in the least mind asking Edward to refund it to her. But she felt the well-known drop into her usual condition of calculating economy.

Her husband came home that night with a bad headache, and the night after she had another bill waiting for him for repairs on the furnace. It was unexpectedly and villainously large, and Mrs. Atwood was constitutionally incapable of adding another straw to his burden, while she stood by consenting sympathetically unto his righteous wrath. A day later, when she spoke of going to town to buy the material for her new costume with outward buoyancy, but inward panic at the rapid shrinkage of her funds, Sam, a boy of twelve, announced the fact that he must have a new suit of clothes at once. As it was Saturday, he could accompany her.

“What is the matter with those you have on? They are not in the least worn out,” said his mother.

“Mamma, they’re so thin that I’m freezing all the time I’m in school. You ought to have heard me coughing yesterday.”

“You have the old blue suit; I’m sure that’s thick enough.”

“The blue suit! Yes, and it hurts me, it’s so tight I can hardly walk in it. I can’t sit down in it at all. It makes ridges all around my legs.”

Mrs. Atwood looked at her son with rare exasperation. It was well known that when Sam took a dislike to his clothes for any reason, they always hurt him. His coats, his trousers, his caps, his shoes, even his neckties developed hitherto unsuspected attributes of torture. And there was always a haunting feeling with the outraged dispenser of these articles that it might be true. A penetrative and scornful remark from the passing Josephine at once emphasized this view of the case to the anxious mother, remorseful already at her own lack of sympathy.

“I’m astonished at you, Josephine. If the clothes hurt him—” but the girl had disappeared beyond hearing. Sam came from town that jubilant evening, in warm and roomy jacket and trousers, and, oh, weakness of woman! with a new football, besides. Mrs. Atwood carried with her a box of lead soldiers for Eddy, and a sweet little fluffy thing in neckwear for Josephine, such as she saw other girls displaying. After all, what was her own dress in comparison with the darling children’s happiness? She would get some cheap stuff and make it up herself. No one would know the difference.

“How about your suit, Jo?” asked her husband one evening as they sat around the fire. “Is it almost finished?”

“Not—exactly,” said Mrs. Atwood.

“The club goes to Washington on the fifteenth of the month, it was decided to-day. Nearly all the men are going to take their wives with them. I’m looking forward to showing off mine.”

“My mamma will look prettier than any of them,” said Eddy belligerently.

“And lots younger,” added Sam.

“Have you ordered the suit yet?” asked the voice of Josephine. Oh, how her mother dreaded it!

“No, I haven’t—yet,” she felt herself forced into saying.

“I don’t believe there is any money left for it,” pursued the pitiless one. “She spends it for other things, papa. She pays bills and doesn’t tell, because she hates to bother you. And she buys things for us. And she paid a subscription to the Orphan’s Home yesterday, and she got a new wash-boiler for Katy. And—”

“Hush, hush, Josephine,” said her father severely. “I found that receipted bill of Patrick’s lying around the other day, Jo. I should have paid you back at once. How much money have you left?”

“Oh, Edward—I’m so foolish. I—”

“Have you thirty dollars?”

“I—I don’t think so.”

“Have you twenty?”

“I haven’t—more than that.” She had, as she well knew, the sum of nine dollars and sixty-seven cents in the purse in her dressing table drawer.

“Will this help you out?” His tone had the business-like quality in it as natural as breathing to a man when he speaks of money matters, and which a woman feels almost as a personal condemnation in its chill removal from sentiment.

“Oh, Edward—please don’t! It makes me feel so—” She tried not to be too abject. “But nearly all of it has gone for necessary things.”

“That’s all right.” He added with a touch of severity. “Don’t let there be any mistake about it this time, Jo,” and she murmured contentedly,

“No. No, indeed.”

With her allowance money, too, how could there be?

Mrs. Atwood now set herself seriously to the work of getting appareled. She read advertisements, and went to town two days in succession, bringing home samples of cloth for family approval; she sought the advice of her young sister-in-law, Mrs. Callender, and of her friend, Mrs. Nichols, with the result that she finally sat down one morning immediately after breakfast, and wrote a letter to a New York firm ordering a jacket and skirt made like one in a catalogue issued by them, and setting down her measurements according to its directions. Just before she finished, a maid brought her up word that Mrs. Martindale was below.

“Mrs. Martindale—at this time in the morning!”

Mrs. Martindale was her cousin, and lived over the other side of the track, some distance away. Mrs. Atwood hurried down with a premonition of evil to find the visitor, a pretty woman, elegantly but hastily gowned, sitting on the edge of a chair, as if ready for instant flight. There was a wild expression in her eye.

She began at once, taking no notice of Mrs. Atwood’s greeting.

“I suppose you think I’m crazy to come here in this way. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I didn’t know what to do. We’re in such a state!”

“Is it the business?”

“Oh, it’s the estate and the business and everything. Mr. Bellew’s death has just brought the whole thing to a standstill. All the money is tied up in some dreadful way—don’t ask me. Of course it will be all right in three or four weeks, Dick says, and we have credit everywhere. It’s just to tide over this time. But we haven’t a penny of ready money; not a penny. It would be ridiculous if it wasn’t horrible. Dick gave me all he could scrape together last week, and told me to try and make it last, but it’s all gone—I couldn’t help it. And the washerwoman comes to-day. If you could let me have ten dollars, Jo; I couldn’t bear to let Dick know.”

“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with loving alacrity. “Don’t say another word.” If she felt a pang, she scorned it.

“You don’t know how many calls there are on one,” murmured the other, sinking back with relief.

Mrs. Atwood thought she did, but she only said, “You poor thing,” and rushed upstairs to get one of her crisp ten-dollar bills; she could not use the house money for this. She passed Josephine in the hall, afterwards, on her way to school, and held the bill behind her, but she felt sure the girl’s keen eyes had spied it.

“I’m so glad I had it! Are you sure this will be enough?” she asked as the other kissed her fervently. What were clothes for herself in comparison with poor Bertha’s need? She would look over the catalogue again to-morrow, when she had time, and order a cheaper suit, or buy one ready made.

After all, she did neither. Her money—but why chronicle further the diminution of her forces? Delay made it as inevitable as the thaw after snow. Her entire downfall was completed the day she had unexpected and honorable company to dinner, and sent Sam out to the nearest shops instead of those at which she usually dealt, to “break a bill”—heart-rending process—in the purchase of fruits and sweets for their consumption. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why the change from five dollars never amounts to more than two dollars and sixteen cents. Poor Mrs. Atwood could never get quite used to the fact that if she spent money it was gone. She cherished an underlying hope that she could get it back somehow.

As the time approached for the Washington trip she did not dare to meet her Edward’s eye, and replied but feebly to his unusually jolly anticipations of “this time next week.” She had hoped that she might have some excuse to remain at home, much as she had longed for this jaunt alone with her husband, but there seemed to be no loophole of escape.

She tried to freshen up her heaviest skirt, and took the spring jacket she was wearing and made a thick lining to it, planning to disguise it further with a piece of fur at the neck. She felt horribly guilty when Josephine came in and caught her at it. The tall girl with her red cheeks just out of the wintry air looked at her mother with an inscrutable expression, but she merely said,

“I suppose that’s to save your new suit. You’ll never be able to get into it, if you put so much wadding in,” and went off again. The mother felt relieved, yet a little hurt, too, in some mysterious way.

Many a time she tried to screw her courage up to confessing that she had no outer raiment; that after all the money and all her promises she had nothing to show in exchange. The fatal moment had to come, but she put it off. She had done it so many times! For herself she did not mind; she could have confessed joyfully to all the crimes in the Decalogue, if it would have benefited her dear ones, but to wound their idea of her, to pain them by showing how unworthy she was, how unfit to be trusted—that came hard. She prayed a great deal about it on her knees by the bed in the dusk of her own room when she came upstairs after dinner, on the pretext of “getting something”; she belonged to the old-fashioned, child-like order of women who do pray about things, not only daily, but hourly, and who, unknown to themselves, exhale the sweetness born of heavenly contact.

She wondered if, perhaps, it might not be better if she were dead, she was such a poor manager, and set such a bad example to the children. Josephine had that clear common sense that she lacked. The girl was getting to be so companionable to her father, too. She had the sacrificial pleasure of the victim when she heard them laughing and talking downstairs together.

“Well, Jo, has your suit come home yet?”

It was three nights before the fateful Thursday, and the family were grouped in the library as was their wont in the evenings immediately after dinner. Eddy was lying on the fur rug playing with the cat in the warmth of the wood fire, and Mr. Atwood, in a big chair with his wife leaning on the arm of it, sat watching the little boy. The two older children were studying by a table in the back of the room in front of a shaded lamp, with a pile of books before them.

Mr. Atwood, although his hair and mustache were grizzled and his face prematurely lined, had a curious faculty of suddenly looking like a boy, under some pleasurable emotion; anticipation of his holiday made him young for the moment. His wife thought him beautiful.

“Did you say it had not come home yet? You must be sure to have it on time. Take all your party clothes along, too.”

“Oh, yes, I’m going to,” said Mrs. Atwood. She was on sure ground here. The gown she had had made for a wedding in the spring was crying to be worn again.

“What color did you decide on?”

“I—I decided on—brown,” said Mrs. Atwood with fixed eyes. Her respite was gone.

“Brown—yes, I always liked you in brown. Have you heard your mother talk much about her new clothes, Josephine?”

“No,” said Josephine, “I haven’t.”

“Didn’t you wear brown when we went on our wedding trip? It seems to me that I remember that. I know you had red berries in your hat, for I knocked some of them out.”

“Were you married in a brown dress?” called Sam.

“No,” answered the father for her, “your mother was married in white—some kind of white mosquito-netting. What makes you look so unhappy, Jo? Aren’t you glad to go off with me—in a new suit?”

“Edward!” said Mrs. Atwood. She rose and stood in front of him, her dark eyes unnaturally large, the color coming and going in her rounded olive cheek. Her red lips trembled. Here, before the loved and dreaded domestic tribunal she would be shriven at last. Her children should know just what she was like. “Edward! I have something to tell you.”

“There’s the door bell,” said her husband with an arresting hand, as he listened for the outer sounds.

“A package, sir. By the express. Twenty-five cents.”

“Have you the change, Jo? It’s some clothes I ordered myself for the Washington trip; I wanted to do you credit. Oh, don’t go upstairs for it.”

“I don’t mind,” said Mrs. Atwood. Change! She had nothing but change. Clothes! How easy it was for him to get them! Do her credit—in his glossy newness, while she was in that old black skirt, grown skimp and askew with wear, and that tight, impossible jacket! She charged up and down stairs in the vehemence of her emotion, filled with anger at her folly, and paid the man herself before reentering the library.

Her husband was untying the cords of the long pasteboard box with slow and patient fingers. He was a man who had never cut a string in his life. The children were standing by in what seemed unnecessary excitement, their faces all turned to her as she came toward them. Edward had lifted the cover of the box.

“What color are your clothes, Edward?” asked his wife. It was the first time that he had ever bought anything without consulting her.

“What color? Oh—brown,” said Mr. Atwood. He swooped her into a front place in the circle with his long arm. “Here, look and tell me what you think of this.”

“Edward!”

“Lined throughout with taffeta, gores on every frill—why, Jo! Bring your mother a chair, Josephine.”

Before the eyes of Mrs. Atwood lay the rich folds of a cloth skirt, surmounted by a jacket trimmed with fur.

She lay back in the armchair with the family clustered around her, their tongues loosened.

“We all knew about it—” “We promised not to tell—” “We wanted to see you get it—” “There won’t be anybody as pretty as you, mamma.” “You left out that letter of measurements, and papa and I took it to Aunt Cynthia”—this from Josephine—“and she helped us. She says you’re disgracefully unselfish.” The girl emphasized her remark with a sudden and strangling hug. “There isn’t anybody in the world as good as you are. I was watching you all last week; I knew you wouldn’t buy a thing. But it was papa who thought of doing it, when I told him. Feel the stuff—isn’t it lovely? so thick and soft. He and Aunt Cynthia said you should have the best; she can spend money! And you’re to go uptown to-morrow with me to buy a hat with red in it, and if the suit needs altering it can be done then. Don’t you like it, mamma?”

“It’s perfectly beautiful,” said the mother, her hands clasped in those of her three darlings, but her eyes sought her husband’s.

He alone said nothing, but stood regarding her with twinkling eyes, through a suspicion of moisture. What did she see in them? The love and kindness that clothed her not only with silk and wool, but with honor; that made of this new raiment a vesture wherein she entered that special and exquisite heaven of the woman whose husband and children arise up and call her blessed.