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“OUR parlor carpet is beginning to look real shabby,” said Mrs. Cartwright. “I declare! if I don’t feel right down ashamed of it, every time a visitor, who is anybody, calls in to see me.”

“A new one will cost–“

The husband of Mrs. Cartwright, a good-natured, compliant man, who was never better pleased than when he could please his wife, paused to let her finish the sentence, which she did promptly, by saying,–

“Only forty dollars. I’ve counted it all up. It will take thirty-six yards. I saw a beautiful piece at Martin’s–just the thing–at one dollar a yard. Binding, and other little matters, won’t go beyond three or four dollars, and I can make it myself, you know.”

“Only forty dollars! Mr. Cartwright glanced down at the carpet which had decorated the floor of their little parlor for nearly five years. It had a pleasant look in his eyes, for it was associated with many pleasant memories. Only forty dollars for a new one! If the cost were only five, instead of forty, the inclination to banish this old friend to an out-of-the-way chamber would have been no stronger in the mind of Mr. Cartwright. But forty dollars was an item in the calculation, and to Mr. Cartwright a serious one. Every year he was finding it harder to meet the gradually increasing demand upon his purse; for there was a steadily progressive enlargement of his family, and year after year the cost of living advanced. He was thinking of this when his wife said,–

“You know, Henry, that cousin Sally Gray is coming here on a visit week after next. Now I do want to put the very best face on to things while she is here. We were married at the same time, and I hear that her husband is getting rich. I feel a little pride about the matter, and don’t want her to think that we’re growing worse off than when we began life, and can’t afford to replace this shabby old carpet by a new one.” No further argument was needed. Mr. Cartwright had sixty dollars in one of the bureau drawers,–a fact well known to his wife. And it was also well known to her that it was the accumulation of very careful savings, designed, when the sum reached one hundred dollars, to cancel a loan made by a friend, at a time when sickness and a death in the family had run up their yearly expenses beyond the year’s income. Very desirous was Mr. Cartwright to pay off this loan, and he had felt lighter in heart as those aggregate of his savings came nearer and nearer to the sum required for that purpose.

But he had no firmness to oppose his wife in anything. Her wishes in this instance, as in many others, he unwisely made a law. The argument about cousin Sally Gray was irresistible. No more than his wife did he wish to look poor in her eyes; and so, for the sake of her eyes, a new carpet was bought, and the old one–not by any means as worn and faded as the language of his wife indicated–sent up stairs to do second-hand duty in the spare bedroom.

Not within the limit of forty dollars was the expense confined. A more costly pattern than could be obtained for one dollar a yard tempted the eyes of Mrs. Cartwright, and abstracted from her husband’s savings the sum of over fifty dollars. Mats and rugs to go with the carpet were indispensable, to give the parlor the right effect in the eyes of cousin Sally Gray, and the purchase of these absorbed the remainder of Mr. Cartwright’s carefully hoarded sixty dollars.

Unfortunately, for the comfortable condition of Mrs. Cartwright’s mind, the new carpet, with its flaunting colors, put wholly out of countenance the cane-seat chairs and modest pier table, and gave to the dull paper on the wall a duller aspect. Before, she had scarcely noticed the hangings on the Venetian blinds, now, it seemed as if they had lost their freshness in a day; and the places where they were broken, and had been sewed again, were singularly apparent every time her eye rested upon them.