Katherine, Chapters XVII-XX [pp. 394-416]

402 KATKAkiAr~ [Dec.,
to her to render necessary. Anna Germain was soon chafing
against them with a visible and growing irritation, and even
Katharine, who sympathized with her mother's motives without
fully comprehending all of them, thought them overstrained and
needless. Their tenure of the house they occupied was too
near its term to make it worth while to share it with another
family, as Mrs. Dan forth at first proposed; but the head of faithful Hannah, who had been with her for many years, fell straightway into the basket. She begged to stay at {owered wages, but
her mistress, in the first access of her economic fever, refused to
listen to the proposition.
"But I have almost nothing to do," she persisted in replying
to her daughter's early entreaties that she would spare herself.
"There are only three of us, and you two are away the best
part of nearly every day. You may belp me in the mornings
and evenings, if you like, but I cannot afford Hannah's keep
~ven, much less to pay her wages."
And to Anna, who undertook some time afterwards to demonstrate to her by dint of figures that her income would cover the
actual outlay, even were the latter increased so as to include this
expense, she replied, with a touch of irritability that was new
to her:
"I don't care about your arithmetic. I never kept accounts
myself, and I never mean to, but I know enough to put the quarter's money into my bureau-drawer and take good care that it
isn't all gone before the next comes in. It is all very well for
you children to talk. He that knows nothing fears nothing.
The more I can save the better I like it."
"But why, mother?" urged Katharine, when they were alone
together later on. It was near the holidays; Anna was spending the evening with the Whites, with whom she had quickly
cemented an intimacy from which she apparently derived much
pleasure, and the mother and daughter were sitting on either side
of a not very brisk fire built in the dining-room grate. "Can't
we really afford to light the furnace-fire and have some one to
attend to it? Anna is vexed, I know, about that and other
things. She says the parlors are so cold always that she is
ashamed to take people in there when they call upon her. And
then she does not like to study down here. It makes no difference to me-I have always been used to doing my lessons
beside you; but she told me the other day that she thought she
paid enough to have a right to be made comfortable."
I thought we might avoid that expense this winter," an