We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house. Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not know plus what--that is one of those good little in-between things which we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had Miggy go within Peter's house,--not as within doors, but as within arms. We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour--the kind of man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it. There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner wall was occupied by a map of the state--why does a man so cherish a map of something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books--what is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to save putting it up in the fall--this business of getting a stove on rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl. "We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like he was being buried from it, same as they're used for." "Why--" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it. Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were somebody to give it a touch or two. Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he explained, would have been the dining room, only he had taken it for his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing than any lonely "I." "This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm not at the works. Come and let me show you."