Mrs. Lorch and her daughter lived half a mile from the Swedish Reform Church, in an old square frame house, with a porch supported by frail1 pillars, set in a damp yard full of big lilac bushes. The house, which had been left over from country times, needed paint badly, and looked gloomy and despondent2 among its smart Queen Anne neighbors. There was a big back yard with two rows of apple trees and a grape arbor3, and a warped4 walk, two planks5 wide, which led to the coal bins6 at the back of the lot. Thea’s room was on the second floor, overlooking this back yard, and she understood that in the winter she must carry up her own coal and kindling8 from the bin7. There was no furnace in the house, no running water except in the kitchen, and that was why the room rent was small. All the rooms were heated by stoves, and the lodgers9 pumped the water they needed from the cistern10 under the porch, or from the well at the entrance of the grape arbor. Old Mrs. Lorch could never bring herself to have costly11 improvements made in her house; indeed she had very little money. She preferred to keep the house just as her husband built it, and she thought her way of living good enough for plain people.
Thea’s room was large enough to admit a rented upright piano without crowding. It was, the widowed daughter said, “a double room that had always before been occupied by two gentlemen”; the piano now took the place of a second occupant. There was an ingrain carpet on the floor, green ivy12 leaves on a red ground, and clumsy, old-fashioned walnut13 furniture. The bed was very wide, and the mattress14 thin and hard. Over the fat pillows were “shams” embroidered15 in Turkey red, each with a flowering scroll—one with “Gute’ Nacht,” the other with “Guten Morgen.” The dresser was so big that Thea wondered how it had ever been got into the house and up the narrow stairs. Besides an old horsehair armchair, there were two low plush “spring-rockers,” against the massive pedestals of which one was always stumbling in the dark. Thea sat in the dark a good deal those first weeks, and sometimes a painful bump against one of those brutally16 immovable pedestals roused her temper and pulled her out of a heavy hour. The wall-paper was brownish yellow, with blue flowers. When it was put on, the carpet, certainly, had not been consulted. There was only one picture on the wall when Thea moved in: a large colored print of a brightly lighted church in a snow-storm, on Christmas Eve, with greens hanging about the stone doorway17 and arched windows. There was something warm and home, like about this picture, and Thea grew fond of it. One day, on her way into town to take her lesson, she stopped at a bookstore and bought a photograph of the Naples bust18 of Julius Caesar. This she had framed, and hung it on the big bare wall behind her stove. It was a curious choice, but she was at the age when people do inexplicable19 things. She had been interested in Caesar’s “Commentaries” when she left school to begin teaching, and she loved to read about great generals; but these facts would scarcely explain her wanting that grim bald head to share her daily existence. It seemed a strange freak, when she bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen said to Mrs. Lorch, “no pictures of the composers at all.”
Both the widows were kind to her, but Thea liked the mother better. Old Mrs. Lorch was fat and jolly, with a red face, always shining as if she had just come from the stove, bright little eyes, and hair of several colors. Her own hair was one cast of iron-gray, her switch another, and her false front still another. Her clothes always smelled of savory20 cooking, except when she was dressed for church or Kaffeeklatsch, and then she smelled of bay rum or of the lemon-verbena sprig which she tucked inside her puffy black kid glove. Her cooking justified21 all that Mr. Larsen had said of it, and Thea had never been so well nourished before.
The daughter, Mrs. Andersen,—Irene, her mother called her,—was a different sort of woman altogether. She was perhaps forty years old, angular, big-boned, with large, thin features, light-blue eyes, and dry, yellow hair, the bang tightly frizzed. She was pale, anaemic, and sentimental22. She had married the youngest son of a rich, arrogant23 Swedish family who were lumber
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