There was to be a wonderful change in their affairs—that was the main thing that impressed the minds of the four sisters. Dot had been the first to express it concretely, when she suggested they might treat themselves on Saturdays to something beside the usual five cents’ worth of peppermint drops.
“I expect,” said Tess, “that we won’t really know how to live, Dot, in so big a house. Just think! there’s three stories and an attic!”
“Just as if we were living in this very tenement all, all alone!” breathed Dot, with awe.
“Only much better—and bigger—and nicer,” said Tess, eagerly. “Ruth remembers going there once with mother. Uncle Peter was sick. She didn’t go up stairs, but stayed down with a big colored man—Uncle Rufus. She ’members all about it. The room she stayed in was as big as all these in our flat, put together.”
This was too wonderful for Dot to really understand. But if Ruth said it, it must be so. She finally sighed again, and said:
“I—I guess I’ll be ’fraid in such rooms. And we’ll get lost in the house, if it’s so big.”
“No. Of course, we won’t live all over the house. Maybe we’ll live days on the first floor, and sleep in bedrooms on the second floor, and never go up stairs on the other floors at all.”
“Oh, well!” said Dot, gaining sudden courage—and curiosity. “I guess I’d want to see what’s on them, just the same.”
There were people in the big tenement house quite as poor as the Kenways themselves. Among these poor families Ruth distributed the girls’ possessions that they did not wish to take to Milton. Tommy Rooney’s mother was thankful for a bed and some dishes, and the kitchen table. She gave Tommy a decisive thrashing, when she caught him jumping out of the dark at Dot on the very last day but one, before the Kenways left Essex Street for their new home.
Master Tommy was sore in spirit and in body when he met Tess and Dot on the sidewalk, later. There were tear-smears on his cheeks, but his eyes began to snap as usual, when he saw the girls.