"When I got to be eighteen I thought I was old enough to branch out and do something for myself—I've always tried to hold up my own end. My little school went first-rate. There was only one drawback—another school next door, full of great rowdy boys. They would climb the fence and make faces at my scholars; yes, and sometimes they would throw stones. But that wasn't the worst: the other school taught book-keeping. Now, I never was one of the kind to lag behind, and I used to lie awake nights wondering how I could catch up with the rival institution. Well, I hustled around, and finally I got hold of two or three children who were old enough for accounts, and I set them to work on single entry. I don't know whether they learned anything, but I did—enough to keep Granger's books for the first year after we started out."
Jane smiled broadly; it was useless to set a stoic face against such confidences as these.
"We were married at the most fashionable church in town—right there in Court-house Square; and ma gave us a reception, or something like it, in her little front room. We weren't so very stylish ourselves, but we had some awfully stylish neighbors—all those Terrace Row people, just around the corner. 'We'll get there too, sometime,' I said to Granger. 'This is going to be a big town, and we have a good show to be big people in it. Don't let's start in life like beggars going to the back door for cold victuals; let's march right up the front steps and ring the bell like somebody.' So, as I say, we were married at the best church in town; we thought it safe enough to discount the future."
"Good for you," said Jane, who was finding her true self in the thick of these intimate revelations; "you guessed right."
"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to Granger:—'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and—' The fact is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this room in the daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people. You ought to have been here at the bal poudré I gave last season—lots of pretty girls in laces and brocades, and powder on their hair. It was a lovely sight.... Come; we've had enough of this." Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis Quinze splendor. "The next thing will be something else."
Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment. "This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my distinguished guests."
"Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's 'Alhambra' by heart. "Only it isn't Moorish; it's Baroque—and a very good example."
The room had a heavy paneled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners, half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment, broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is Baroque all over."
"See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly, "are you the woman who read about the 'Decadence of the Renaissance Forms' at the last Fortnightly?"
"I'm the woman," responded Jane modestly.