"I don't see how I could stand anything bigger or grander than this."
"Stand anything more? Ha-hum! Well, that's just about what I expected you to say, Laura. Sometimes I wonder if there ever was a man more handicapped than I am. Look at this! What have I done for you? Why, I changed your whole life for you, as much as though you'd died and been born into another world. You couldn't have had all this if it hadn't been for me. You don't enjoy it. You've got no use for it. I don't set even this for my limit. I've got ambition, and I'm going up as far as a man can go in this country. If that means New York, all right, when the time comes. But what does my wife say? 'Oh, I couldn't stand that!' Stand it—why, I half believe, Laura, you wish you were back in Kelly Row right now—I believe that's right where you'd be this minute, if you had your choice."
"I would, John; if things could be the way they once were."
He only growled as he turned away petulantly.
"Of course I want to see you do well, get ahead, John, as far as ever you can go. And of course you'd never be happy to go back there again."
"Happy?—me—Kelly Row? You'd see John Rawn dead and buried first! I'd go jump in the lake if I thought I'd ever have to live again the way we used to."
"I wonder how they are doing back there now," said Mrs. Rawn, in spite of all, as though musing with herself. "It's evening now, and the men are just coming home from work. I wonder if Jane English, next door to us, has another baby this year. She always had, you know. And there's the young woman, Essie Hannigan, who always used to wait on the steps for her husband. And the dogs; and the babies in the street. And the little trees without very many leaves on them—why, John, I can see it all as plain as if it were right here. This house of ours here is so grand I can't understand it. How did we get it, John?—when we worked so long, so many years, and lived just like those others there? It all came at once. Have you earned all this—in a year or so? And how did you get it almost finished, before we moved up here, while we still were living in St. Louis—without either of us being here to watch the carpenters?"
"I did it with money, Laura, that's how. If you have money you can get anything done you want; and you don't have to do it with your own hands. But don't say 'carpenters'—it was an architect built this house."
"It cost a lot of money!"
"Not so much—I've not got in over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars yet, even with most of the furnishings in."