"Let her have them. A little parlor singing helps any girl with the young men. I notice you courted me from the choir. If she waits for encouragement from you, her accomplishments won't amount to a row of pins." "You see, papa, I'm going to take the commercial course at High and learn stenography and typewriting, so it will just balance my education fine." "Well, little woman, whatever you say." "You know what I say." "Don't you think she is a bit too young?" Mimetically: "No, I don't think she's a bit too young. The sooner you wake up to the fact that your daughter is growing up, the better. She's a graduate already from grammar school." "Papa, I'm on the graduating program." "For what, daughter?" "A piano solo. 'Alice,' with variations." "Well, Carrie, if that is the way you feel about it--if you think those kind of lessons are good for her--" "That is the way I feel about it." These little acid places occurring somewhere in almost every day hardly corroded into Lilly's accustomed consciousness. If they etched their way at all into Mr. Becker's patient kind of equanimity, the utter quietude of his personality, which could efface itself behind a newspaper for two or even three hours at a time, never revealed it. His was the stolidity of an oak, tickled rather than assailed by a bright-eyed woodpecker. "Little woman" he liked to call her in his nearest approach of endearment, although it must have been her petite quickness rather than a diminutive quality that earned the appellation. Even when he had wooed her in Granite City, Missouri, and she had sung down at the quiet-faced youth from a choir loft, she was after the then prevalent form of hourglass girlish loveliness. Now she was rather enormous of bust, proudly so, and wore her waist pulled in so that her hips sprang out roundly. A common gesture was to place her hands on her hips, press down, and breathe sharply inward, thus holding herself for the moment from the steel walls of her corsets. Their removal immediately after dinner was a ritual to be anticipated during the day. She would sit in her underbodice, unhooked of them, sunk softly into herself, her hands stroking her tortured jacket of ribs and her breath flowing deeper. "I don't believe I'd pull in quite so tight, Carrie, if I were you. It will tell on your health some day." "You don't catch me with a sloppy figure. I don't give a row of pins for the woman without some curve to her." To Mrs. Becker a row of pins was the basest coinage of any realm. It ran through her speech in pricking idiom. She was piquant enough of face, quick-eyed, and with little pointy features enhanced by a psyche worn as emphatically as an exclamation point on the very top of her head. On eucher or matinee days her bangs, at the application of a curling iron, were worn frizzed, but usually they were pinned back beneath the psyche in straight brown wisps.