He did it quite seriously.  Do we seem very amusing to you?  So anxious lest we should betray our economies—­so impressed with our social “position” and what people might think!  It is funny enough to me, looking back; but it was bitter business then.

I set myself to playing the devoted and absorbed young mother.  But it was a long, long time before it became the sweetest of realities.  I cried the first time I refused a bridge game to “stay with baby”; and I carried a sore heart those long spring afternoons when I pushed his carriage conspicuously up and down the avenue while the other women motored past me out for tea at the club.  Yet those long walks were the best thing that ever happened to me.  I had time to think, for one thing; and I gained splendid health, losing the superfluous flesh I was beginning to carry, and the headaches that usually came after days of lunching and bridge and dining.

I fell into the habit, too, of going around by the market, merely to have an objective, and buying the day’s supplies.  The first month of that habit my bills showed a decrease of $16.47.  I shall always remember that sum, because it is certainly the biggest I have ever seen.  I began to ask the prices of things; and I made my first faint effort at applying our game of substitution to the food problem, a thing which to me is still one of the most fascinating factors in housekeeping.

One afternoon in late summer, I found a delightful little bungalow in process of building, on a side street not so very far from the proper avenue.  I investigated idly, and found that the rent was thirty dollars less than we were paying.  Yet even then I hesitated.

    It was Max who had the courage to decide.

    “The only thing we are doing without is the address,” he said, “And
    that isn’t a loss that looks like $360 to me.”

All that fall and winter we kept doggedly at our game of substitution.  Max bought a ready-made Tuxedo, and I ripped out the label and sewed in one from a good tailor.  I carried half a dozen dresses from the dyer’s to a woman who evolved three very decent gowns; and then I toted them home in a box with a marking calculated to impress any chance acquaintance.  We were so ashamed of our attempts at thrift that they came hard.

Often enough we quarreled after we had been caught in some sudden temptation that set us back a pretty penny, and we were inevitably bored and cross when we refused some gayety for economy’s sake.  We resolutely decided to read aloud the evenings the others went to the theater club; and as resolutely we substituted a stiff game of chess for the bridge that we could not afford.  But we had to learn to like them both.

Occasionally we entertained at very small, very informal dinners, “on account of the baby”; and definitely discarded the wines