Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/272

260 Mrs. Joliffe laughed. "All sorts o' divilmint," she said, kissing Bailey. "I been settlin' things in a kind o' way till you 'd be able to put 'em to rights." She stood aside from the doorway. "Here's the parlor."

Hetty looked it over. She had it in her mind that the walls were like a stationer's window in Christmas week, and the whole room was as old-fashioned as her mother; but she said nothing. She accepted the arrangement as provisional: she could change it to the latest styles of Altgelt's furniture displays, in due course.

Bailey had been a country boy who had come to the city to be a millionaire, and he had been living in shabby hall-bedrooms. If he did not seem sufficiently enthusiastic about the parlor, it was because he did not wish them to think he was not accustomed to such magnificence. Added to this country reticence, he had the art of accepting a bargain with a show of reluctance. He said: "It 'll do us all right, won't it, Hetty?"

She pretended that she had not heard.

But Mrs. Joliffe was not discouraged. She introduced Bailey to a little tobacco-table set with a tobacco-jar, a corncob pipe, and a tobacco-cutter on a mahogany board—the very cutter with which Joliffe had sliced his plugs. A padded armchair stood beside the table. A pair of new "morocco" slippers waited under the chair, and a tin spittoon beside it. "That 's the place fer you," she said, "when yuh come home with yer boots tired o' yer feet."