The Bread-winners | Page 5

said, "Mrs. Belding's man came over to ask, would you dine there this evening, quite informal."
"Why didn't he come in?"
"I told him you were engaged."
"Ah, very well. Say to Mrs. Belding that I will come, with pleasure."

II.
A HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATE.
Miss Matchin picked up her train as she reached the gate, picked up her train as she reached the gate, and walked down the street in a state of mind by no means tranquil. If she had put her thoughts in words they would have run like this:
"That was the meanest trick a gentleman ever played. How did he dare know I wasn't nearsighted? And what a fool I was to be caught by that photograph--saw it as plain as day three yards off. I had most made up my mind to leave them off anyway, though they are awful stylish; they pinch my nose and make my head ache. But I'll wear them now," and here the white teeth came viciously together, "if they kill me. Why should he put me down that way? He made me shy for the first time in my life. It's a man's business to be shy before me. If I could only get hold of him somehow! I'd pay him well for making me feel so small. The fact is, I started wrong. I did not really know what I wanted; and that graven image of an English butler set me back so; and then I never saw such a house as that. It is sinful for one man to live there all alone. Powers alive! How well that house would suit my complexion! But I don't believe I'd take it with him thrown in."
It is doubtful whether young girls of Miss Matchin's kind are ever quite candid in their soliloquies. It is certain she was not when she assured herself that she did not know why she went to Farnham's house that morning. She went primarily to make his acquaintance, with the hope also that by this means she might be put in some easy and genteel way of earning money. She was one of a very numerous class in large American towns. Her father was a carpenter, of a rare sort. He was a good workman, sober, industrious, and unambitious. He was contented with his daily work and wage, and would have thanked Heaven if he could have been assured that his children would fare as well as he. He was of English blood, and had never seemed to imbibe into his veins the restless haste and hunger to rise which is the source of much that is good and most that is evil in American life. In the dreams of his early married days he created a future for his children, in the image of his own decent existence. The boys should succeed him in his shop, and the daughters should go out to service in respectable families. This thought sweetened his toil. When he got on well enough to build a shop for himself, he burdened himself with debt, building it firmly and well, so as to last out his boys' time as well as his own. When he was employed on the joiner-work of some of those large houses in Algonquin Avenue, he lost himself in reveries in which he saw his daughters employed as house-maids in them. He studied the faces and the words of the proprietors, when they visited the new buildings, to guess if they would make kind and considerate employers. He put many an extra stroke of fine work upon the servants' rooms he finished, thinking: "Who knows but my Mattie may live here sometime?"
But Saul Matchin found, like many others of us, that fate was not so easily managed. His boys never occupied the old shop on Dean Street, which was built with so many sacrifices and so much of hopeful love. One of them ran away from home on the first intimation that he was expected to learn his father's trade, shipped as a cabin-boy on one of the lake steamers, and was drowned in a storm which destroyed the vessel. The other, less defiant or less energetic, entered the shop and attained some proficiency in the work. But as he grew toward manhood, he became, as the old man called it, "trifling"; a word which bore with it in the local dialect no suggestion of levity or vivacity, for Luke Matchin was as dark and lowering a lout as you would readily find. But it meant that he became more and more unpunctual, did his work worse month by month, came home later at night, and was continually seen, when not in the shop, with a gang of low ruffians, whose head-quarters were in a den called the "Bird of Paradise," on the