Belles on their Toes

dining room before lunch, an hour or so after Mother's departure. From an odor not unlike that of burning leaves, we gathered that Tom was having trouble with the cooking again. Part of the economy drive would have to be aimed in that direction.
    Anne had been left $600 to run the family during Mother's five-week absence. That included the cost of our tickets to Nantucket, Massachusetts, because we intended to spend the summer at our cottage there, as usual. Mother had made the boat reservations to Nantucket, an island off Cape Cod, and Anne was to pay for them when we picked them up.
    We thought it would be a good idea to spend only $300, and to turn the rest back to Mother, as a surprise, when she joined us at Nantucket.
    "In the first place," Anne told us, "there is the milk bill. Thirteen quarts a day. More than three gallons."
    Anne was sitting at Mother's place, at the head of the oval dining-room table. As the oldest one at home, the senior officer present, she was automatically in commana. Ten feet away, in Dad's place, sat Frank. The rest of us, including Bob and Jane, who were still in high chairs, sat around the perimeter.
    Anne had Dad's check stubs, some bills, and the family budget book spread out before her.
    "The milk bill alone amounts to more than $50 a month," she said. "I don't see how Daddy paid for all these things. Cheaper by the dozen, nothing!"
    We decided we could get along with only nine quarts, without anyone dying of malnutrition.
    "Each of us is going to have to sacrifice a little," Anne continued, thumbing through the check stubs.
    She called out the amounts on the stubs and what they were for. Food and clothes. We were going to have to cut down on them. Doctors' bills. We didn't intend to have any. Dentists' bills. Everybody's teeth that needed straightening had been straightened. Tobacco. Certainly not. Gasoline. We had already sold Dad's car. Dancing school…
    "Frank and I," Bill suggested, "could do our part by cutting out dancing school." Bill was eleven, and it was a fight every Monday afternoon to get him into his Buster Brown collar and patent-leather pumps.
    "We couldn't ask you to do that," Martha smirked.
    "We're willing to sacrifice a little," Bill said.
    Dancing school went into the discard, and Bill ran a relieved finger around his soft and unbuttoned collar. Also abandoned were music lessons, which everybody sacrificed without too much reluctance. We drew the line at cutting allowances, since all of us thought Dad kept them trimmed pretty close to the bone. But we aid institute a series of fines that would reduce our take-home pay. Leaving on an electric light or the cold water would cost the offender two cents; hot water, four cents; failure to do any of the things on the process charts, five cents.
    Dad had the household organized on an efficiency basis, just as he organized a factory. He believed that what worked in a household would work in a factory, and what worked in a factory would work in a household—especially if the household happened to have eleven children.
    The process charts, first developed for industry, were an example. They told each of us what we were supposed to do, and when we were supposed to do it.
    The charts were in the boys' and girls' bathrooms, upstairs. They listed duties such as washing the dishes, making the beds, combing hair, brushing teeth, weighing ourselves, listening for fifteen minutes a day to French and German language records on the phonograph, sweeping, and dusting.
    Dad had things broken down to such a fine point that Lillian, who wasn't tall enough to reach table tops and high shelves, dusted the legs and the lower shelves. Ernestine did the tops and the high shelves.
    We decided we could eat much more cheaply if we cut out roasts and steaks, except perhaps on Sundays. Ernestine was a good shopper, so she would plan the meals, stressing such items as frankfurters and baked beans, and she would do most of the buying. We already got our canned goods from wholesalers, so we couldn't save there.
    Ernestine would also try to teach Tom the necessity for putting such ingredients as baking powder into the corn muffins, and of adding water to fresh vegetables before placing them on the stove.
    Martha, who was the most efficient of all of us and could keep her money the longest, was put in charge of the budget. She also would supervise the packing of clothes for Nantucket.
    We talked about the matter of college. Anne had just completed