was something warm and home, like about this picture, and Thea grew fond
of it. One day, on her way into town to take her lesson, she stopped at
a bookstore and bought a photograph of the Naples bust of Julius Caesar.
This she had framed, and hung it on the big bare wall behind her stove.
It was a curious choice, but she was at the age when people do
inexplicable things. She had been interested in Caesar's "Commentaries"
when she left school to begin teaching, and she loved to read about
great generals; but these facts would scarcely explain her wanting that
grim bald head to share her daily existence. It seemed a strange freak,
when she bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen said
to Mrs. Lorch, "no pictures of the composers at all."

Both the widows were kind to her, but Thea liked the mother better. Old
Mrs. Lorch was fat and jolly, with a red face, always shining as if she
had just come from the stove, bright little eyes, and hair of several
colors. Her own hair was one cast of iron-gray, her switch another, and
her false front still another. Her clothes always smelled of savory
cooking, except when she was dressed for church or KAFFEEKLATSCH, and
then she smelled of bay rum or of the lemon-verbena sprig which she
tucked inside her puffy black kid glove. Her cooking justified all that
Mr. Larsen had said of it, and Thea had never been so well nourished
before.

The daughter, Mrs. Andersen,--Irene, her mother called her,--was a
different sort of woman altogether. She was perhaps forty years old,
angular, big-boned, with large, thin features, light-blue eyes, and dry,
yellow hair, the bang tightly frizzed. She was pale, anaemic, and
sentimental. She had married the youngest son of a rich, arrogant
Swedish family who were lumber merchants in St. Paul. There she dwelt
during her married life. Oscar Andersen was a strong, full-blooded
fellow who had counted on a long life and had been rather careless about
his business affairs. He was killed by the explosion of a steam boiler
in the mills, and his brothers managed to prove that he had very little
stock in the big business. They had strongly disapproved of his marriage
and they agreed among themselves that they were entirely justified in
defrauding his widow, who, they said, "would only marry again and give
some fellow a good thing of it." Mrs. Andersen would not go to law with
the family that had always snubbed and wounded her--she felt the
humiliation