“No. Please do the things up and put them into my car for me. How much is it all?”

“Oh, that’s all right. You’re Miss Frazier, aren’t you? You folks have a charge account here.”

“However, I want to pay for these things myself. Do not by any means put them on Miss Frazier’s account.” Elsie spoke primly but with flushed cheeks that contradicted her outward composure.

“Thought I’d just tell you. Yesterday when you came in and paid for things Mr. Holt said there must be some mistake.”

“There is no mistake. And will you please put the box of eggs in a bag? Not just tie them with a string like that!”

“We’re going up your way, miss, in about ten minutes. Why don’t we take ’em?”

But Elsie shook her head, biting her lips with annoyance at the young man’s persistence. She commanded him to put the things into the car.

“To the Bookshop now,” she ordered Timothy as they started again.

At the Bookshop Kate did not speak of getting out, though it certainly attracted her more than the grocery store. But Elsie herself turned at the door. “Don’t you want to come, too, Kate?” she called. “It’s an awfully cunning little place.”

Kate and her mother were always drawn by bookshops wherever they found them, and they spent in them during the course of a year a sum that it would have taken no budget expert to see was all out of proportion to their income. But then, Katherine always said when the subject of “budgeting” came up that it was as foolish to make rules about the spending of money as it would be to make rules about the spending of time. It was a matter for the individual, strictly. Kate followed Elsie eagerly, now.

It was such a little shop that Kate, although she immediately gravitated toward a table of books that interested her particularly, could not avoid hearing Elsie’s conversation with the Bookshop woman.

“Have you Havelock Ellis’s ‘Dance of Life’?” she asked.

“Yes, a new order has just come in. I knew Miss Frazier wanted it and I was sending it up first thing this afternoon. Would you like to take it?”

“Yes, I’ll take one for my aunt, if she ordered it. I’ll take two. One is for myself, and I will pay for it.”

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