d remember, he had
been unhappy from the lack of the beautiful in the surroundings of his
daily life. His father had been poor; his mother had been an invalid; and
neither father nor mother had a trace of the artistic temperament. From
what long-forgotten ancestor in his plain, hard-working family had come
Stephen's passionate love of beauty, nobody knew. It was the despair of
his father, the torment of his mother. From childhood to boyhood, from
boyhood to manhood, he had felt himself needlessly hurt and perversely
misunderstood on this one point. But it had not soured him: it had only
saddened him, and made him reticent. In his own quiet way, he went slowly
on, adding each year some new touch of simple adornment to their home.
Every dollar he could spare out of his earnings went into something for
the eye to feast on; and, in spite of the old people's perpetual grumbling
and perpetual antagonism, it came about that they grew to be, in a surly
fashion, proud of Stephen's having made their home unlike the homes of
their neighbors.

"That's Stephen's last notion. He's never satisfied without he's sticking
up suthin' new or different," they would say, as they called attention to
some new picture or shelf or improvement in the house. "It's all
tom-foolery. Things was well enough before." But in their hearts they were
secretly a little elate, as in latter years they had come to know, by
books and papers which Stephen forced them to hear or to read, that he was
really in sympathy with well-known writers in this matter of the adornment
of homes, the love of beautiful things even in every-day life.

A little more than a year before the time at which our story begins,
Stephen's father had died. On an investigation of his affairs, it was
found that after the settling of the estate very little would remain for
Stephen and his mother. The mortgage on the old Jacobs house was the
greater part of their property. Very reluctantly Stephen decided that
their wisest--in fact, their only--course was to move into this house to
live. Many and many a time he had walked past the old house, and thought,
as he looked at it, what a bare, staring, hopeless, joyless-looking old
house it was. It had originally been a small, square house. The addition
which Billy Jacobs had made to it was oblong, running out to the south,
and projecting on the front a few feet beyond the other part. This
obtrusive jog was certainly very ugly; and it was impossible