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."

"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to
Granger:--'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to
those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out
some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and--'
The fact is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this
room in the daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people.
You ought to have been here at the _bal poudre_ I gave last
season--lots of pretty girls in laces and brocades, and powder on
their hair. It was a lovely sight.... Come; we've had enough of this."
Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis Quinze splendor.
"The next thing will be something else."

Jane's guide pa