To Johnny Graham this terrible parlor stood for art and luxury. As for Annie, she did not know enough to find the snow-shovel painful, nor even the rolling-pin, another gift from Dave, which, covered with plush, hung from one corner of the mantelpiece. She merely thought of these things as “mother’s” and as “presents,” and valued them accordingly. But she would never have dreamed of occupying this fine room unless there was company; and, indeed, the kitchen was far more homelike.
She sat now nestling down against her father’s shoulder, listening to his story of the day’s work: the fine house on the hill where he had gone to mend a fixture; the nice young lady he had seen; and the toilet-table all covered with silver things.
“Why, Annie, now I tell you, there was brushes and combs made out of silver; and there was five little sorts of silver boxes, different sizes and shapes, hearts and rounds mostly. Didn’t seem to have nothing in ’em. I had to move ’em to get at the bracket. What do you suppose folks has such things for? Now a brush made out o’ silver is no sense; it’s heavy. Annie, now, would you like things like that?”
“Indeed, I wouldn’t,” she said. “Think of the trouble they’d be to keep clean.”
“Well, the help does that in them houses, I suppose,” he ruminated. “Annie, now, suppose you had a lot of money, would you buy them things?”
“Indeed, I wouldn’t!” Annie said again, laughing. “No, I know what I’d do. I heard a girl talking about it. There’s a college for girls somewhere in the East, just like there is for young men. I would go to that college and study. My! wouldn’t I study!”
That was the beginning of what some people called the tragedy of Annie Graham’s life, and some the success—it all depends on how you look at it.
Her chance remark about a girl’s college lingered in her father’s thoughts; Johnny Graham had not known that there were such things as women’s colleges. There were primary schools and high schools and “pay” schools, where he supposed the swells sent their children, but his knowledge never went farther than this.
“A college for girls!” Well, why not? He believed girls was smarter than boys any day in the year; anyway his Annie was. He thought about it constantly, when, to save something for that inheritance in the bank, he walked to and from his work; and he thought of it while he worked. He spoke of it, when he had the chance, in a tentative way to two or three persons for whom he was doing jobs of gasfitting. Did they ever hear anything of them girls’ colleges? What was they like? Did they cost money? Once, in the big morning-room of an old-fashioned house, he spoke to an old lady who sat by the fire while he screwed a lava tip on the burner over the mantelpiece. She was an old woman and rich, and so she ought to know about such things, Johnny Graham reasoned; so, with the respectful guilelessness of the American workman, he cleared his throat and said, he wondered, now, if she was knowing anything about girls’ colleges?