ant. It would be a restaurant with a
vinegar cruet in the centre of the table and plates of thick bread at
each end and lovely little oyster crackers for the soup. Perhaps if you
had two dollars extra you might order terrapin."

"And pickles," put in Bea generously, "with striped ice-cream."

"And angel food with chocolate frosting an inch thick," contributed Lila.

"It's a long time till spring," said Robbie Belle regretfully, "but very
likely we will need all that while to save it up."

As it turned out, they did need all that while to save it up. For
beauty-loving Berta with her eternally slim purse and hopelessly meagre
account-book, the plan at first seemed only a vision of the moment.
Nobody can save out of nothing, can she? Robbie Belle, however, had a
stubborn fashion of clinging to an idea when once it became fixed. Her
ideas, furthermore, were apt to be clean-cut and definite. This is how
she reasoned it out:

If a girl receives five dollars a month from home to pay for books and
postage and incidentals, she is entitled to whatever she saves from the
allowance. Every time this girl refrains from writing a letter, she has
really saved two cents or the value of the stamp, to say nothing of the
paper. Whenever she walks down town instead of riding, she has a right to
the nickel to add to the fund in the back of her top bureau drawer. If
she buys a ten-cent fountain-pen instead of a dollar one, she virtually
earns ninety cents. If she rents a grammar for twenty-five cents instead
of paying one dollar and a half for a new book, she is a thrifty person
who deserves the difference. Every time she declines--mournfully--to drop
in at the restaurant for dinner with a crowd of friends, or refuses to
join in a waffle-supper, Dutch treat, she is so much nearer being a
melancholy and noble capitalist.

"Yes, that's all right for you," assented Berta airily when told of this
working theory, "but supposing you don't have the money to save in the
first place? I fail to receive five dollars a month from home or even one
dollar invariably; and I always walk to town and never enter the
restaurant except to wait while you save ten cents by buying half a pound
of caramels when you want to buy a whole pound."

"They're forty cents a pound, Berta," objected scrupulous Robbie Belle.
"I really saved twenty cents yesterday, you see."

"Ah, of course, how distressingly inaccurate of me. And I also--I saved
five dollars and fourte