She paused in the hall. "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the rooms before you go up?"
"Yes—I don't mind," responded Jane. She was determined to encourage no ostentatious pride; so she made her acceptance as indifferent as she felt good manners would allow.
Mrs. Bates crossed over the hall and paused in a wide doorway. "This," she indicated, in a tone slightly suggestive of the cicerone, "is the—well, the Grand Salon; at least, that's what the newspapers have decided to call it. Do you care anything for Louis Quinze?"
Jane found herself on the threshold of a long and glittering apartment; it was full of the ornate and complicated embellishments of the eighteenth century—an exhibition of decorative whip-cracking. Grilles, panels, mirror frames, all glimmered in green and gold, and a row of lustres, each multitudinously candled, hung from the lofty ceiling.
Jane felt herself on firmer ground here than in the library, whose general air of distinction, with no definite detail by way of guide-post, had rather baffled her.
"Hem!" she observed critically, as her eyes roamed over the spacious splendor of the place; "quite an epitome of the whole rococo period; done, too, with a French grace and a German thoroughness. Almost a real jardin d'hiver, in fact. Very handsome indeed."
Mrs. Bates pricked up her ears; she had not expected quite such a response as this. "You are posted on these things, then?"
"Well," said Jane, "I belong to an art class. We study the different periods in architecture and decoration."
"Do you? I belong to just such a class myself—and to three or four others. I'm studying and learning right along; I never want to stand still. You were surprised, I saw, about my music lessons. It is a little singular, I admit—my beginning as a teacher and ending as a pupil. You know, of course, that I was a school-teacher? Yes, I had a little class down on Wabash Avenue near Hubbard Court, in a church basement. I began to be useful as early as I could. We lived in a little bit of a house a couple of blocks north of there; you know those old-fashioned frame cottages—one of them. In the early days pa was a carpenter—a boss carpenter, to do him full justice; the town was growing, and after a while he began to do first-rate. But at the beginning ma did her own work, and I helped her. I swept and dusted, and wiped the dishes. She taught me to sew, too; I trimmed all my own hats till long after I was married."
Mrs. Bates leaned carelessly against the tortured framework of a tapestried causeuse. The light from the lofty windows shattered on the prisms of her glittering chandeliers, and diffused itself over the paneled Loves and Graces around her.