FOURTEEN POUNDS WHEN BORN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17182, 27 October 1923, Page 9 (Supplement)

FOURTEEN POUNDS WHEN BORN.

better that the Big Love should l*o on the man’s side, if it is to be a rather one-sided grande passion. Gratitude so ten develops into love on the woman’s part ; never on the man's. With him it remains—just gratitude, growing dangerously irksome with the parsing of the years. When a girl knows in her heart that she cannot face solitude, and a big man offers her a big love, she is a fool to refuse it. It is only the abnormal woman—abnormally strong-minded, abnormally attuned to solitude, who can mellow to content in the love years and the later years cf difficult middle age. all alone. Does it strike you that Daphne fills the bill ?” I recalled Daphne's luminous dark eyes that always flashed unconsciously eloquent signals in a congenial mascu line presence , and Daphne's generous but wayward heart that would need a stronger heart to lean on—-Daphne, fine, alluring, brilliant, but a sentimentalist in her bones. ‘Eve,” T said, “you are a matchmaking witch. But 1 hope you have your way again'” Eve smiled. “One must be a groat humourist, my dear, oi a great misogynist. to live alone. Typical woman is -.either. She i" a sentimental vanitarion. autocratically eager to have one little universe revolving round the axis of her heart. I know a born careerist ]

i ! just to see wliat did happen to it. • Now, after a year of account-keeping I i J have formed my views about the wisdom of so doing and 1 have also discovered its pitfalls. ■ j For there are two dreadful pitfalls ■ —the danger of account-keeping becom- : ing u fetish, an obsession, and the danger of developing a methodical ; meanness that, once formed, is difficult to overcome. In my desire to do the thing thoroughly | started by jotting down every single penny I spent—and oh, the worrying hours it gave me! I How I would rack my brains if. at j end of the day. I was a fraction out! J Gradually, my accounts began to rule j | me; if one week’s expenditure was I J larger than another, I began to go i J through the items to see where I might j i have saved ; and when I began to spend ; money with one eye anxiously fixed on I my bank balance, I found all the joy of my care-free, account less days had gone out of a shopping expedition or an excursion. I told my trouble to a friend and j she advised me to manage my accounts ' just as a business man manages his—to allow a fixed .sum weekly for all odds and ends of expenditure that had caused me so much trouble. And it acts w onderful Iv! Each week. I put by n sum to spend as I like and leave unaccounted for. A\ lien that is gone

my extravagances cease for the week. Within the limits of mv petty cash I can spend wildly or dribble it> away ns I choose- -and am not brought to book. That is, 1 think, the secret of successful account-keeping. To jot down all the big items of expenditure keeps one from violent extravaugance ! and an allowance of petty cash saves one from erring oil the other, even more unpleasant. side —that of meanness and cheese-paring.