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