“Roast beef, two-forty?” he presently read aloud, questioningly.

“Twenty-two cents a pound,” his wife answered simply.  But the man’s slight frown deepened.

“Too much—­too much!” he said, shaking his head.

Mrs. Salisbury let him read on a moment, turn a page or two.  Then she said, in a dead calm: 

“Do you think my roasts are too big, Kane?”

“Too big?  On the contrary,” her husband answered briskly, “I like a big roast.  Sometimes ours are skimpy-looking before they’re even cut!”

“Well!” Mrs. Salisbury said triumphantly.

Her smile apprised her husband that he was trapped, and he put down the account book in natural irritation.

“Well, my dear, it’s your problem!” he said unsympathetically, returning to his newspaper.  “I run my business, I expect you to run yours!  If we can’t live on our income, we’ll have to move to a cheaper house, that’s all, or take Stanford out of school and put him to work.  Dickens says somewhere—­and he never said a truer thing!” pursued the man of the house comfortably, “that, if you spend a sixpence less than your income every week, you are rich.  If you spend a sixpence more, you never may expect to be anything but poor!”

Mrs. Salisbury did not answer.  She took up her embroidery, whose bright colors blurred and swam together through the tears that came to her eyes.

“Never expect to feel anything but poor!” she echoed sadly to herself.  “I am sure I never do!  Things just seem to run away with me; I can’t seem to get hold of them.  I don’t see where it’s going to end!”

“Mother,” said Alexandra, coming in from the kitchen, “Marthe says that all that delicious chicken soup is spoiled.  The idiot, she says that you left it in the pantry to cool, and she forgot to put it on the ice!  Now, what shall we do, just skip soup, or get some beef extract and season it up?”

“Skip soup,” said Mr. Salisbury cheerfully.

“We can’t very well, dear,” said his wife patiently, “because the dinner is just soup and a fish salad, and one needs the hot start in a perfectly cold supper.  No.  I’ll go out.”

“Can’t you just tell me what to do?” asked Alexandra impatiently.

But her mother had gone.  The girl sat on the arm of the deserted chair, swinging an idle foot.

“I wish I could cook!” she fretted.

“Can’t you, Sandy?” her father asked.

“Oh, some things!  Rabbits and fudge and walnut wafers!  But I mean that I wish I understood sauces and vegetables and seasoning, and getting things cooked all at the same moment!  I don’t mean that I’d like to do it, but I would like to know how.  Now, Mother’ll scare up some perfectly delicious soup for dinner, cream of something or other, and I could do it perfectly well, if only I knew how!”

“Suppose I paid you a regular salary, Sandy—­” her father was beginning, with the untiring hopefulness of the American father.  But the girl interrupted vivaciously: