The Gift of the Magi Wealth Quotes Page 1
Citations follow this format: (Paragraph)
| Quote #1 One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. (1) |
The very first line of the story emphasizes just how poor Jim and Della are. It's agonizingly difficult to even save up such a small sum of money. Della's poverty also means she has to humiliate herself in front of others by being a penny pincher.
| Quote #2 A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad. (3) |
Jim and Della live in a very humble apartment indeed. The narrator uses both the word "beggar" and "mendicancy" (a mendicant is a beggar). You might think that Jim and Della would benefit from the generosity of others, not from giving their own things away.
| Quote #3 The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. (5) |
Here we get the meager figures of Jim's salary. The remark about the name on the mailbox also shows that Jim and Della are self-conscious about their poverty, and that they're humble. They care about how they appear to others, and they're currently so poor that they're even embarrassed to have a name that might sound pretentious.
