I could think of was Carl, Carl, Carl, and getting married. Yet no
one--no one on this earth--ever had the fun out of their engaged days
that we did, when we were together. Carl used to say that the
accumulated expenses of courting me for almost four years came to
$10.25. He just guessed at $10.25, though any cheap figure would have
done. We just did not care about doing things that happened to cost
money. We never did care in our lives, and never would have cared, no
matter what our income might be. Undoubtedly that was the main reason we
were so blissful on such a small salary in University work--we could
never think, at the time, of anything much we were doing without. I
remember that the happiest Christmas we almost ever had was over in the
country, when we spent under two dollars for all of us. We were
absolutely down to bed-rock that year anyway. (It was just after we paid
off our European debt.) Carl gave me a book, "The Pastor's Wife," and we
gloated over it together all Christmas afternoon! We gave each of the
boys a ten-cent cap-pistol and five cents' worth of caps--they were in
their Paradise. I mended three shirts of Carl's that had been in my
basket so long they were really like new to him,--he'd forgotten he
owned them!--laundered them, and hung the trio, tied in tissue paper and
red ribbon, on the tree. That _was_ a Christmas!

He used to claim, too, that, as I got so excited over five cents' worth
of gum-drops, there was no use investing in a dollar's worth of French
mixed candy--especially if one hadn't the dollar. We always loved
tramping more than anything else, and just prowling around the streets
arm-in-arm, ending perhaps with an ice-cream soda. Not over-costly, any
of it. I have kept some little reminder of almost every spree we took in
our four engaged years--it is a book of sheer joy from cover to cover.
Except always, always the need of saying good-bye: it got so that it
seemed almost impossible to say it.