“Well, you’re a real student, I guess,” he told her, and passed his rough, grimy hand over her soft hair. “Did I pull your hair?” he said, for it seemed as though she winced; but she only answered by taking his hand and kissing it, which made her father protest, and then cuddle her up in his arms and say, “Well, now, Annie, I think you’re a real scholar.” They sat in the kitchen, but not because they had not a parlor, like everybody else. There was a best room behind the kitchen, and upstairs two bedrooms, and above them an attic, rented to Dave Duggan, a steady young workman who had lodged with them for nearly a year. Of course, obviously--propinquity being the root of love--he had a tenderness for Annie; and he was referred to by the women who were not Annie’s stepmothers as her “feller.” The parlor, in which the gasfitter rarely sat, was as frankly ugly as the outside of the small, narrow frame house. It had been furnished according to Mrs. Graham’s taste, and it had been religiously unchanged since her death. The tapestry carpet, with its monstrous roses and broad green leaves, had worn and faded into inoffensiveness, and the red rep furniture had suffered the same kindly change; but the knitted tidies were new, and the plush picture frames; and Annie had added the knots of china silk on the chair-backs; and on the wall there was a snow-shovel, painted and gilded and tied with pink satin ribbons, and also some decorated brass placques; on the mantelpiece were two little wooden shoes,--Dave Duggan’s gift,--gilded and adorned with blue satin bows, and used as match-boxes. To Johnny Graham this terrible parlor stood for art and luxury. As for Annie, she did not know enough to find the snow-shovel painful, nor even the rolling-pin, another gift from Dave, which, covered with plush, hung from one corner of the mantelpiece. She merely thought of these things as “mother’s” and as “presents,” and valued them accordingly. But she would never have dreamed of occupying this fine room unless there was company; and, indeed, the kitchen was far more homelike. She sat now nestling down against her father’s shoulder, listening to his story of the day’s work: the fine house on the hill where he had gone to mend a fixture; the nice young lady he had seen; and the toilet-table all covered with silver things. “Why, Annie, now I tell you, there was brushes and combs made out of silver; and there was five little sorts of silver boxes, different sizes and shapes, hearts and rounds mostly. Didn’t seem to have nothing in ’em. I had to move ’em to get at the bracket. What do you suppose folks has such things for? Now a brush made out o’ silver is no sense; it’s heavy. Annie, now, would you like things like that?” “Indeed, I wouldn’t,” she said. “Think of the trouble they’d be to keep clean.” “Well, the help does that in them houses, I suppose,” he ruminated. “Annie, now, suppose you had a lot of money, would you buy them things?”