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Updated: June 26, 2025
"Many were the pokings and pinchings of frock and apron, the smoothings down before and twitchings down behind of the not less anxious mother. Often did she retreat to examine more correctly the general effect of the coup d'oeil, and as often return to rectify some injudicious pin or remodel some rebellious fold.
There will be tears for plans forgone, the changing of the little ones' schools and elder children's careers, unpleasant letters to be written home, and more unpleasant ones to be received from relatives who 'told you so from the first. There will be pinchings too, and straits of which the outside world will know nothing, but the women will pull it through smiling.
Algernon has thrust his head far out between the rungs of his chair-back, and affects to be unable to withdraw it again, making movements of simulated suffocation. The Brat is stealthily walking on his knees across the space that intervenes between them to Barbara, with intent, as I too well know, of unseemly pinchings.
There was no immediate improvement in their condition. Both were impatient of the pinchings of poverty. Neither was constitutionally disposed to work hard and patiently for an honest competence. The celebrated "Female Pills" formed the philosopher's stone which released them from this condition of chafing discontent and brooding unrest.
Let him observe with what care they dress them out on Sundays with means deducted from their own scanty meals. Let him observe the husband, who has toiled, like his horse, all the week, nursing the babe, while the wife is preparing dinner. Let him observe them both abstaining from a sufficiency, lest the children should feel the pinchings of hunger.
The only positive results they are accustomed to get from the fiesta are the marks of the aforesaid pinchings, the vexations, and at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves with candy and cake in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the custom, and Filipino children enter the world through these ordeals, which afterwards prove the least sad, the least hard, of their lives.
There they have to dance, sing, and recite all the amusing things they know, whether in the humor or not, whether comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the eternal pinchings and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give them cuartos which their parents seize upon and of which they hear nothing more.
If Sister Agatha or Sister Catharine were on duty, it meant that I would have at least one spoonful forced into my mouth and held there till cold sweat bedewed my face. In addition there would be pinchings, slappings, and ear-tweakings very painful, these last. And sometimes I would be reported, and docked of that day's dinner to boot.
Then, too, the memory of that mother's face, and even the very tones of her voice as she prayed that God would guide her boy's footsteps aright, came back to him now, and into the remembrance too was woven all of that mother's kind and patient acts; all her earnest and good advice; all her self-denials; all the pinchings and small economies she had endured to enable him to receive an education, and as each and all came trooping back like so many little hands tugging at his heart-strings and moistening his eyes, he realized that there was needed in this hurrying, selfish life of ours something deeper, and something beyond the skepticism of Voltaire and the materialism of Ingersoll.
Heaven and her own memory alone recorded those scrapings and pinchings and nice calculations of morsels by which she had contrived to save a few pounds for her outcast brother. Such sordid economics show but poorly on earth; but it is probable that in the mass of documentary evidence which goes before the Great Judge, Mademoiselle Lenoble's account-book will be placed on the right side.
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