Belles on their Toes

asked, pointing to Fred. "Is he the one who has to approve them all?"
    "Not exactly," Mother said. "It's just that the boys agreed Fred would have to approve Bill's suit, Dan would have to approve Fred's, Jack would..."
    "Yeeees," the clerk interrupted, looking around him furtively. "Of course. I see."
    By the time the suits had been selected, the boys' department was beginning to take on the appearance of a firehouse dormitory. Coats, pants, and vests, many of them in positions just as the boys had wriggled out of them, were on chairs, tables,
    hooks, and the floor. The clothes racks were as culled and gaping as a turkey roost on Thanksgiving Day.
    The clerk, now perspiring freely, led the boys to the underwear counter, where Mother found another chair.

    "We can pay a dollar a pair," Bill told him.
    "What color?" asked the salesman, who knew better now than to haggle over the price.
    "You don't have to worry about that," Bill said. "The only thing we don't want is what Tom calls Indian drawers."
    "Don't be Eskimo," Mother warned. "Eskimo" was Mother's word for anything that was deemed evil minded. She seldom seemed to miss a reference.
    "The kind that creeps up on you," the salesman nodded morosely. "I'm dying laughing." He pulled out some boxes. "Let's see, now. Less than a dollar, any color, no Indian drawers. This has been, if I may say so, a unique experience."
    "If there's anything I hate it's drawers like that, don't you, Mother?" Dan asked. "You can hardly sit still in them."
    "I think," smiled Mother, burying her head in her crocheting, "you'd better pay attention to what the gentleman's showing you."
    The underwear finally selected was on special sale, and was produced for inspection only after all other brands had been rejected as having Indian characteristics.
    "These are just what we want," Bill said, when the specially priced goods were brought out from under a counter. "We'll take twenty pairs of them, please. Mother has the sizes."
    "Only three to a customer," the salesman shook his head. "We lose money on every one of these we sell at that price."
    "We certainly don't want to hurt your business," Bill agreed. "Since there are only six of us, I guess all we can take is eighteen pairs then."
    The clerk, now beginning to walk as if in a trance, got the sizes from Mother and added the underwear to the growing pile of merchandise.
    "To save time," he said, as we arrived at the shoe counter, "and to save me the trouble of showing you every shoe in the store, suppose you explain to me in detail, beforehand, just what it is you want in a shoe."
    "The first one who says a foot," Bill warned the other boys, "is going to get in trouble with me. I think we're taking up too much of this man's time."
    "I don't suppose," the salesman ignored him, "that what you'd want is what everybody else gets for their boys—a high black shoe that wears well."
    "Yes," Bill nodded, "I think that's just what we do want."
    "I thought maybe you didn't care about the color or whether it was high or low, just so long as the eyelets didn't rust, and the laces were genuine Western cowhide."
    "Do you have any with laces like that?" Fred asked eagerly.
    "No," the clerk yelled, "we don't. And I don't know whether our eyelets rust or not."
    Fred was subdued. "Funny store," he whispered. "They try to sell you things they haven't got."
    There was a good deal of bickering, but the boys finally decided on the shoes, shirts, ties and socks.
    "I guess it's been trying for you," Mother told the salesman sincerely as she paid the bill. "But I think that buying is an important part of every child's education, don't you?"
    "What's that?" he said, fumbling in his side pocket for the hearing aid switch. "I had it turned off. I can hear you now. I couldn't stand to listen any more."
    "You mean," Mother asked, and the boys thought there was a trace of envy in her voice, "that all you have to do is turn a switch, and you can't hear anything at all?"
    He nodded.
    "It's wonderful what science can do," Mother said. There was no doubt about it. It was envy.

9
MOTHER'S SCHOOL

    Eight of us, Ernestine down through Jack, went back to school in Montclair. Anne rode a day coach to Ann Arbor and enrolled as a junior at the University of Michigan. She joined a sorority within a few weeks and was taken into Phi Beta Kappa that spring.
    Mother, besides supervising everything at home, got down to the job of trying to support the family.
    The financial outlook