TIME-BUY IT.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 36, 12 September 1891, Page 375

TIME-BUY IT.

BY

LILY SHERMAN RICK.

not ’ You need it badly enough, surely. You have ‘ given up your musicyou ‘ can’t get out to concei ts ;’ you’re ‘ too tired to enjoy the Association meetings ;’ your correspondents aie * all out of patience with you ;’ and yon ‘ haven’t read a new book for six months.* You buy other things freely enough, not necessary things merely, but unnecessary ones. Lately, to my certain knowledge, you have bought a Woodstock rug, an escalloped oyster dish, and drapery curtains for the re-ception-room. I suspect you of meditating a set of fringed table linen this very minute. To be sure, I know all these comforts did not come simply by the saying. Most of them represent planning and self-denial. The oyster dish recalls those chamber carpets you made over and put down yourself, instead of hiring the help your goodman proposed ; the Woodstock took several months’ egg money ; the drapery is a reminder of that sultry January when you ‘got on’ without help in your kitchen. I don’t deny that you have to scheme and contrive for the pretty things you are gradually collecting in your house. But the fact remains, you do scheme, you do contrive, you do buy them. Then why not buy time? You have tried saving it already, and you seem to have exhausted the possibilities in that direction. They are pretty quickly exhausted, in spite of all you have said to the contrary. That being careful of what one has will not take

the place, indefinitely, of supplying one’s self with more, is a principle which applies as well to leisure as to clothing. And there is this peculiarity about time, as about health, that the stock is limited. What you do not secure at once you cannot have at all. If you cannot invite your friends to such a table as you would like, it is a small matter ; your husband’s income may allow of your doing more for them some time. The bare spaces on your walls need not disturb you ; the children may hang pictures theie for you, by and by. But the time that you do not have now—who shall give it to you 1 And who shall give to your husband and children, your friends and your neighbours, the happy, healthful companionship they might have had if you had been more free from care ? You are never so chary of money as when it is a question of buying time. Do you realise that ? You take burden after burden upon yourself, dutifully, complacently even, so only there is a gain in money, and do not think at all of the loss in time. You are so glad of a chance to rip and turn and make over, so eager to learn to do yourself what before you had paid some one else to do for you ! Last year you found out how much cheaper it was to have your dressmaking carried on in the house ; this year you hope to be able to cut and make your own gowns. Do not misunderstand me, my friend. There is no wish to put a slight on the many women whose circumstances compel them to such economies as these, and to far harder ones. But circumstances alter cases, and yours—-be thankful—is not such a case. To work early and late, to deny yourself rest and leisure and improvement, that your house inay be decent and orderly and your children tidy and wellis one thing. To make the same amount of sacrifice for millinery and upholstering is another. There is a line somewhere, and each of us must try to draw it, between the comfort which is worth working for and the luxury which had better be dispensed with. And one woman’s comfort may be another woman’s luxury. * The materialistic tendency of the age ’ is felt in the home as well as on the street. Wherefore, covet earnestly the best gifts.

And the best gifts for us all—next to those which can come only from the Great Giver Himself—are the gifts of time : time to read and study and think and plan, time to talk with onr friends, time to breathe the fresh air and walk over the hills and linger on the rocks by the sea, time

to learn of the world’s needs and pray for them, time to find rest after our work and comfort in it, time to grow strong and happy and helpful and hopeful and brave.