From the income of this building her father had insisted that Adelaide must pay all her expenses. As Madame's boarding school was a fashionable one, the margin left, after the payment of tuition, to be divided between dress and charity, was not very large.
Mr. Armstrong knew that Adelaide's weakness was a love for beautiful clothing; that she delighted in sumptuous velvets, in the sheen of satin, and the shimmer of gauze. Her regal beauty would not have been over-powered by a queen's toilette, but she adorned the simplest costume, and set the fashion in hats for the school season.
Mr. Armstrong also knew that Adelaide was very tender of heart, and that if left entirely to herself she would gladly have opened the doors of her tenement house freely to unscrupulous and undeserving people; that she would have easily credited every woeful story, and have remitted rents when it would have been no real kindness to do so. He therefore pitted these two weaknesses against each other. "We will see what comes of it at the close of the year," he said. "She may become a grinding, close-fisted proprietress, screwing the last possible dollar out of the poor to lavish it on her own personal adornment, but I hope better things of Adelaide than that. It would be more like her, I think, to go to the opposite extreme--dress like an Ursuline nun and take nothing from her tenants; but let us hope that she may be able to strike the golden mean."
It was a hard thing to do, and Adelaide went without a new winter cloak until nearly Christmas time, waiting for the Morettis to pay up an arrearage; and only consented to the turning out of a shiftless family who occupied the best apartment, and were three months behind hand, because the tuition for the first term at Madame's would be due in a few days, and a respectable wood engraver offered to pay two months in advance. It was hard, because she did not wish to spend all the money on herself. She was as interested as any of us in the Home of the Elder Brother, and longed to contribute more generously to it; but since these poor people were her tenants, they were in some sense her own family, and she felt that charity began at home. Often I know that Adelaide denied herself as really, in not being more lenient, as her tenants did to scrape together their monthly rental. She was a generous girl to her friends, and before her father had made this arrangement she deluged us all with her presents. Milly, who had unlimited credit at several stores, kept up this pernicious custom of lavishly giving presents of flowers and candies. It was hard for Winnie and me, who were in moderate circumstances, not to return them, but doubly so for Adelaide--who entreated her to desist, as we all did, but without avail. Milly was incorrigible. "You don't seem to understand," Winnie said to her at Christmas time, "that the receipt of a gift which one cannot return in kind is a bitter pill to a sensitive nature."