inlaid tables to be found in
Florence or Venice. For Peterkin sent there for them by a gentleman to
whom he said:

'Git the best there is if it costs a fortune. I'm bound to lick the
crowd.'

This was his favorite expression; and when his house was done, and he
stood, his broad, white shirt-front studded with diamonds and his coat
thrown back to show them, surveying his possessions, he felt that he
'had licked the crowd.'

Jerrie felt so, too, as she followed the elegant Leo up the stairs and
through the upper hall--handsomer, if possible than the lower one--to
the pretty room where Ann Eliza lay, or rather reclined, with her lame
foot on a cushion and her well one incased in a white embroidered silk
stocking and blue satin slipper. She was dressed in a delicate blue
satin wrapper, trimmed with swan's-down, and there were diamonds in her
ears and on the little white hands which she stretched toward Jerrie as
she came in.

'Oh, Jerrie,' she said, 'I am so glad to see you, for it is awfully
lonesome here; and if one can be homesick at home, I am. I miss the
girls and the lessons and the rules at Vassar; much as I hated them when
I was there; and just before you came in I wanted to cry. I guess my
rooms are too big and have too much in them; any way, I have the feeling
that I am visiting, and everything is strange and new. I do believe I
liked the old room better, with its matting on the floor and the little
mirror with the peacock feathers ornamenting the top, and that painted
plaster image of Samuel on the mantel. It is very ungrateful in me, I
know, when father has done it mostly to please me. Do you believe--he
has hunted me up a maid; Doris is her name; and what I am ever to do
with her, or she with me, I am sure I don't know. Do you?'

Jerrie did not know either, but suggested that she might read to her
while she was confined to her room. 'Yes, she might, perhaps, do that,
if she can read,' Ann Eliza said. 'She certainly has pretentions enough
about her to have written several treatises on scientific subjects. She
was a year with Lady Augusta Hardy, in Ireland. Don't you remember the
grand wedding father and mother attended in Allington two or three years
ago, when Augusta Browne was married to an Irish lord, who had been
bought by her money?--for of course he did not care much for her. Well,
Doris went out with her as maid, and acts as if she, too, had married a
peer. She came last night, and mamma and I are a