A Daily Rate by Grace Livingston Hill Read Free Book Online

around it. Mrs. Morris listened astonished.
    “Well, I’ve told them boys time an’ again that they ought to stay at home, but they never would before. It must be some sort of a spell you’ve worked on them. Of course, that teacher he stays up in his room a lot. But he’s trying to support his mother and put his brother through college, and you can’t expect much of him. He’ll just give himself up entirely to them and that’ll be the end of his life. There’s always some folks in this world have to be sacrificed to a few others. It’s the way things are. I’m one of those meself, though the land knows who’s the better for me being sacrificed. It does seem as if I had had to give up every blessed thing I ever tried for in my life. Just set down a while. I feel a little easier this evening and I’ve been a-doing a powerful lot of worrying all day. I haven’t a soul to advise me that knows anything. You seem to be made out of good stuff, and you’ve been real good to me, and I just wish you’d tell me what you think I ought to do.”
    Celia sat down. She wondered what could be coming next. It was strange to have her advice asked this way. Coming out into the world alone to earn one’s living places a great many responsibilities upon one sometimes. She felt very incapable of advising. She felt she had not wisdom to settle her own life, let alone another’s, and one so much older than herself, that it would seem as if experience ought to have taught her much. But she tried to be sympathetic, and told Mrs. Morris to tell her all about it, and she would do the best she could. In her heart she prayed the Father that she might have the wisdom to answer wisely.
    “Well, you see it’s this way. I’m just deep down in debt. I told you that before. It’s been going on worse and worse every year, and every year I’d hope by the next to make the two ends meet somehow. But they never did.
    I’ve cut down and cut down. And then I got left two or three times by boarders going off without paying what they owed after I had trusted them a long time. There was that Mr. Perry now, he left that old rickety organ. It was well enough to have an organ for the boarders, but you see I couldn’t afford to have one. 111 could have, I’d have bought a new one, you know. Well, things like that have happened time and again. Once a woman who recited pieces for a living came into the house. She had a lot of dirty satin clothes, and afterward she left quite suddenly and I never knew she was gone till a man came for her trunk. Of course I got the trunk for her board. She had been here two months and only paid one week’s board, kept putting mc off and off. When I had that trunk sold at auction it brought me in just one dollar and sixty-two cents. What do you think of that? And she had the second story front alone too; and airs, why she’d have her breakfast sent up every morning about ten o’clock. She made mc think she was a great woman. Well, I learned better. But it does seem as though I’ve had more trouble with folks. There was the time the woman was here with her little girl, and the child took scarlet fever and the Board of Health came in and sent everybody off, and scared them so ‘twas a long time before I could get them back. Well, there’s been a plenty of other things just like that. You don’t wonder, do you, that I’m in debt? The worst out is it’s been getting worse and worse. That Maggie just wastes everything she lays her hands on, and I don’t know’s I’d better myself any if I tried to get somebody else. There’s always changes and new things to buy. Now what would you do? You see it’s this way. I’ve got a sister out west that lives by herself in a little village. She’s a widow and she’s got enough to live on, and she’s written to me to come out and live with her, and she thinks I could get a little sewing now and then, and I could help her in her house. I can’t ask her for money, for I