A housewife and mom came into some unexpected money ("$15"), probably the equivalent of about $250 today. Suddenly, she's making plans for how to spend that money wisely, mostly on her children -- mend their clothes and save for better quality shoes, etc.
Then there's this paragraph: "The neighbors sometimes talked of certain 'better days' that little Mrs. Sommers had known before she had ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers. She herself indulged in no such morbid retrospection. She had no time -- no second of time to devote to the past. The needs of the present absorbed her every faculty. A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily to-morrow never comes."
Apparently, before she was married to Mr. Sommers, she came from a family in which people didn't have to worry about not having enough money. Once she married him and had several children, however, money became tight and she had to plan and scrimp and budget to make the family's money stretch.
Now -- what happened to her once she laid her hands on those silk stockings in the store?
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=ChoSilk.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1