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Chapter XIV
Round steak .40
Wet wash 1.25
Soap .08
Daily News .02
Tomatoes .14
$1.89

Well, that wasn't bad for a day's expenses. Dot added the little column of figures again to make sure it wasn't a dollar ninety. Every penny counted now. Two hundred dollars for Dr. Stewart had seemed an Herculean undertaking, but now upon that task hardly well begun had fallen another.

Dot had pictured herself lying pale but happy on the bird's-eye maple bed with her baby joyously partaking of his first breakfast.

Dr. Stewart had looked doubtful when she had revealed this vision. "You see, Mrs. Collins," he said, "practically everybody goes to a sanitarium nowadays. Women have learned that it's best that way. You'd have to have a nurse, and while an ordinary maternity nurse is sufficient for your purpose, that would be fifty dollars for the two weeks you need her. You'd have to have a laundress in, and there's a great deal of drugs and sick-room things you'd need, and that would run into money. You're foolish not to go to a sanitarium."

Dot had thought of Edna dropping in to fix broth, of Eddie giving her a sponge bath. Nurses, laundresses, drugs! The bottom dropped out of her simple calculations.