"How shall we cook our dinners?" asked Lubin. "If there's one thing more useful in a house than anything else, I should say it is a grate in the kitchen."
"Oh, Miss Folly tells me never to look forward to winter," cried Matty, "but just enjoy myself while I can. So I am not going to plague myself with either Addition or Division to-day. To look after such vulgar things is only a shopkeeper's business."
"But what will mother say," persisted Nelly, "if she find your cottage unfurnished?"
"Unfurnished, indeed!" cried Matty. "It will be far better furnished than yours. I mean to have French mirrors, and Italian paintings, and German glass and china. I shall get a tambourine also, and perhaps some day a guitar. Miss Folly tells me that Lady Fashion, her most particular friend, has all these; and though they make a fine show, they are not so dear as one would think."
"They are all good and beautiful things, I daresay," began Nelly; "but—"
"But grates must come before mirrors, and carpets before German china," laughed Lubin. "We must buy what is needful first, and think of what is pretty afterwards."
"That may be your way; but it is not my way, and it was never the way of Miss Folly," cried Matty, as she flaunted out of the house.
"I wonder at Dick being so late," observed Nelly; "we ought to be off to the town."
"He is not late, but early," said Lubin. "He had had his breakfast, and started for the town of Education, before I was out of my bed."
"I wish that he had waited for us," cried Nelly; "it is so nice to go through our work all together. You and I had now better set off."