-money:
if a subscription were raised, she gave ten shillings where others gave
one; and on the Saturday holidays she flung about with half-crowns as
Laura would have been afraid to do with pennies.

For the latter with her tiny dole, which had to last so and so long,
since no more was forthcoming, it was a difficult task to move
gracefully among companions none of whom knew what it meant to be
really poor. Many trivial mortifications were the result; and countless
small subterfuges had to be resorted to, to prevent it leaking out just
how paltry her allowance was.

But the question of money was, after all, trifling, compared with the
infinitely more important one of dress.

With regard to dress, Laura's troubles were manifold. It was not only
that here, too, by reason of Mother's straitened means, she was forced
to remain an outsider: that, in itself, she would have borne [P.101]
lightly; for, as little girls go, she was indifferent to finery. Had
she had a couple of new frocks a year, in which she could have been
neat and unremarkable, she would have been more than content. But, from
her babyhood on, Laura--and Pin with her--had lamented the fact that
children could not go about clad in sacks, mercifully indistinguishable
one from another. For they were the daughters of an imaginative mother,
and, balked in other outlets, this imagination had wreaked itself on
their clothing. All her short life long, Laura had suffered under a
home-made, picturesque style of dress; and she had resented, with a
violence even Mother did not gauge, this use of her young body as a peg
on which to hang fantastic garments. After her tenth birthday she was,
she thanked goodness, considered too old for the quaint shapes beneath
which Pin still groaned; but there remained the matter of colour for
Mother to sin against, and in this she seemed to grow more intemperate
year by year. Herself dressed always in the soberest browns and blacks,
she liked to see her young flock gay as Paradise birds, lighting up a
drab world; and when Mother liked a thing, she was not given to
consulting the wishes of little people. Those were awful times when she
went, say, to Melbourne, and bought as a bargain a whole roll of cloth
of an impossible colour, which had to be utilised to the last inch; or
when she unearthed, from an old trunk, some antiquated garment to be
cut up and reshaped--a Paisley shawl, a puce ball-dress, even an old
pair of green rep curtains.