“I mean to lick the crowd,” he said; and a man was sent to Collingwood, and Grassy Spring, and Brier Hill, and lastly to Tracy Park, to take the height of the lower rooms.  Those at Tracy Park were found to be the highest, and measured just twelve feet, so Peterkin’s orders were to “run ’em up—­run ’em up fourteen feet, for I swan I’ll get ahead of ’em.”

So they were run up fourteen feet, and by some mistake, half a foot higher, looking when finished so cold and cheerless and bare that the ambitious man ransacked New York and Boston and even sent to London for ornaments for his walls.  Books were bought by the square yard, pictures by the wholesale, mirrors by the dozen, with bronzes and brackets and sconces and tapestry and banners and screens and clocks and cabinets and statuary, with every kind of furniture imaginable, from the costliest rugs and carpets to the most exquisite 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?’