in an old square frame house, with a porch supported by frail
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 despondent among its smart Queen Anne neighbors. There was a
big back yard with two rows of apple trees and a grape arbor, and a
warped walk, two planks wide, which led to the coal bins 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 kindling from the bin. 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 lodgers pumped the
water they needed from the cistern under the porch, or from the well at
the entrance of the grape arbor. Old Mrs. Lorch could never bring
herself to have costly 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 ivy leaves on a red ground, and clumsy, old-fashioned walnut
furniture. The bed was very wide, and the mattress thin and hard. Over
the fat pillows were "shams" embroidered 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 brutally 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 doorway and arched windows. There