"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. "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."