Oh, dream of neatness, sweetness, and womanly kindness! Miss Flaffer was that to me at the moment. She was a picture, that put away my aunt and all the tenement women who came into our house for beer-drinking, put them away from memory entirely. I thought that she would send me home, and tell me to look tidy before I knocked at her door, or that I had made a mistake, and that such a woman, with her white hands, could not be giving thirty-five cent piano lessons to Al Priddy, a mill-boy! Oh, how awkward, self-conscious, and afraid I felt as I went across that threshold and looked on comforts that were luxuries to me! There was a soft, loose rug on a hardwood, polished floor, on which, at first, I went on a voyage halfway, when the crumpled rug half tripped me and I caught desperately at a fragile chair and half wrenched it from position to stay myself, yet Miss Flaffer did not scold me, nor did she seem to notice me. Then, as we went through a luxurious dining-room (where they did nothing but eat meals!), I found myself bringing my foot down on the train of Miss Flaffer’s dress. Yet, when the confusion was over, she never made a single reference to it, though I felt that I ought to ask her if I had torn it. She led me to a little studio, where, in a curtained alcove, stood a black upright piano polished like a mirror, and before it a stool, which did not squeak like ours when turned into position. When the preliminary examination was over, and I was seated at the piano, Miss Flaffer asked me to play “Home, Sweet Home” as I had learned under my uncle’s instruction. I had been so used to the hard, mechanical working of uncle’s instrument that I naturally pounded unduly on Miss Flaffer’s, until she politely and graciously said, “Please do not raise your fingers so high,” and to that end, she placed two coppers on my hand, and told me to play the tune without letting them drop. After the tune, and while Miss Flaffer had left the room to get her notebook, I noted with chagrin that my perspiring fingers had left marks on the snowy keyboard where they would surely be seen. I listened, and heard Miss Flaffer rummaging among some books, and then desperately spat on my coat cuff and rubbed the keyboard vigorously until I thought that I had obliterated the traces of my fingers. Then Miss Flaffer returned, and I tried to act unconcernedly by whistling, under my breath, “After the Ball.” By the time the lesson was over, it was raining outside, and Miss Flaffer said, “I have to go to the corner of the next street, Albert. (Albert!) I want you to share my umbrella with me so that you will not get wet.”