He showed his teeth.
“I guess I ought to remember to call it that,” he said, “but it always makes me think of Kid MacMurphy’s on Fourth Avenue. He kept what was called a saloon, and he’d had it painted white.”
“Did you know him?” Miss Alicia asked.
“Know him! Gee! no! I didn’t fly as high as that. He’d have thought me pretty fresh if I’d acted like I knew him. He thought he was one of the Four Hundred. He’d been a prize-fighter. He was the fellow that knocked out Kid Wilkens in four rounds.” He broke off and laughed at himself. “Hear me talk to you about a tough like that!” he ended, and he gave her hand the little apologetic, protective pat which always made her heart beat because it was so “nice.”
He drew her back to the advertisements, and drew such interesting pictures of what the lives of two people—mother and son or father and daughter or a young married couple who didn’t want to put on style—might be in the tiny compartments, that their excitement mounted again.
This could be a bedroom, that could be a bedroom, that could be the living-room, and if you put a bit of bright carpet on the little hallway and hung up a picture or so, it would look first-rate. He even went into the matter of measurements, which made it more like putting a puzzle together than ever, and their relief when they found they could fit a piece of furniture he called “a lounge” into a certain corner was a thing of flushing delight. The “lounge,” she found, was a sort of cot with springs. You could buy them for three dollars, and when you put on a mattress and covered it with a “spread,” you could sit on it in the daytime and sleep on it at night, if you had to.
From measurements he went into calculations about the cost of things. He had seen unpainted wooden tables you could put mahogany stain on, and they’d look all you’d want. He’d seen a splendid little rocking-chair in Second Avenue for five dollars, one of the padded kind that ladies like. He had seen an arm-chair for a man that was only seven; but there mightn’t be room for both, and you’d have to have the rocking-chair. He had once asked the price of a lot of plates and cups and saucers with roses on them, and you could get them for six; and you didn’t need a stove as there was the range.
He had once heard Little Ann talking to Mrs. Bowse about the price of frying-pans and kettles, and they seemed to cost next to nothing. He’d looked into store windows and noticed the prices of groceries and vegetables and things like that—sugar, for instance; two people wouldn’t use much sugar in a week—and they wouldn’t need a ton of tea or flour or coffee. If a fellow had a mother or sister or wife who had a head and knew about things, you could “put it over” on mighty little, and have a splendid time together, too. You’d even be able to work in a cheap seat in a theater every now and then. He laughed and flushed as he thought of it.
Miss Alicia had never had a doll’s house. Rowcroft Vicarage did not run to dolls and their belongings. Her thwarted longing for a doll’s house had a sort of parallel in her similarly thwarted longing for “a little boy.”
And here was her doll’s house so long, so long unpossessed! It was like that, this absorbed contriving and fitting of furniture into corners. She also flushed and laughed. Her eyes were so brightly eager and her cheeks so pink that she looked quite girlish under her lace cap.