Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/271

Rh, linoleums, and hall strips. It was her belief that a floor was by nature cold and that the more one put upon it, the warmer the house would be. She covered the windows with white roller-blinds, double sash-curtains of muslin starched like surplices, long lace curtains reaching from the cornice to the floor, and over-curtains of some sort of yellow stuff with an inwoven tinsel thread—until every window was as beautiful in gold embroidery and fine lace as "an archbishop sayin' mass." She crowded the little parlor with unmatched pieces of plush-upholstered furniture, which she had acquired in exchange for trading-stamps. She regilded her old picture-frames with a brush, bought Fourteenth Street colored "art photos," and hung everywhere her holiday calendars, embossed and beribboned, but years out of date.

The kitchen she outfitted as if she were to cook there for a regiment; and in the place of honor she hung two great frying-pans, as thick as iron pots, heirlooms, such pans as are no longer made in these days of gas-stoves and light-housekeeping. She set her arms akimbo and looked about her. "There," she said, with the defiant air of an artist opening his exhibition, "let 'em come."

It was nine o'clock at night when they came. They had been on the train all day, and Hetty looked tired. She was a small blonde, with pale, gray-blue eyes and with one of those firm little mouths that are capable of unlimited silence. "Well, Mother," she asked, with a slow correctness of pronunciation that marked an ambition in her, what 've you been up to?"