acquire value.

So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first opportunity to
fritter away your time over old clothes. You precipitate yourself
unnecessarily against a disagreeable thing. For you are not going to
put your stockings on. Perhaps you will not need your buttons for a
week, and in a week you may have passed beyond the jurisdiction of
buttons. But even if you should not, let the buttons and the holes
alone all the same. For, first, the pleasant and profitable thing
which you will do instead is a funded capital, which will roll you up a
perpetual interest; and secondly, the disagreeable duty is forever
abolished. I say forever, because, when you have gone without the
button awhile, the inconvenience it occasions will reconcile you to the
necessity of sewing it on,--will even go further, and make it a
positive relief amounting to positive pleasure. Besides, every time
you use it, for a long while after, you will have a delicious sense of
satisfaction, such as accompanies the sudden complete cessation of a
dull, continuous pain. Thus what was at best characterless routine,
and most likely an exasperation, is turned into actual delight, and
adds to the sum of life. This is thrift. This is economy. But, alas!
few people understand the art of living. They strive after system,
wholeness, buttons, and neglect the weightier matters of the higher law.

--I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again. I started
for Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket. As I know no good
in tracing the same road back, we may as well strike a bee-line and
begin new at Fontdale.

We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining. I have a veil, a beautiful--HAVE,
did I say? Alas! Troy WAS. But I must not anticipate--a beautiful
veil of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only
for penance, but a silken, gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's cheek.
Yet everybody fleers at it. Everybody has a joke about it. Everybody
looks at it, and holds it out at arms' length, and shakes it, and makes
great eyes at it, and says, "What in the world--" and ends with a huge,
bouncing laugh. Why? One is ashamed of human nature at being forced
to confess. Because, to use a Gulliverism, it is longer by the breadth
of my nail than any of its contemporaries. In fact, it is two yards
long. That is all. Halicarnassus fired the first gun at it by saying
that its length was to enable one end of it to remain at home