"
"You don't?" Mrs. Adams came and stood before her. "Listen,
Alice: your father's asleep; that's his trouble, and he's got to
be waked up. He doesn't know that things have changed. When you
and Walter were little children we did have enough--at least it
seemed to be about as much as most of the people we knew. But
the town isn't what it was in those days, and times aren't what
they were then, and these fearful PRICES aren't the old prices.
Everything else but your father has changed, and all the time
he's stood still. He doesn't know it; he thinks because they've
given him a hundred dollars more every two years he's quite a
prosperous man! And he thinks that because his children cost him
more than he and I cost our parents he gives them--enough!"
"But Walter----" Alice faltered. "Walter doesn't cost him
anything at all any more." And she concluded, in a stricken
voice, "It's all--me!"
"Why shouldn't it be?" her mother cried. "You're young--you're
just at the time when your life should be fullest of good things
and happiness. Yet what do you get?"
Alice's lip quivered; she was not unsusceptible to such an
appeal, but she contrived the semblance of a protest. "I don't
have such a bad time not a good DEAL of the time, anyhow. I've
got a good MANY of the things other girls have----"
"You have?" Mrs.
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