“Won’t you walk in?” she added, with the prim politeness of a child who accosts a guest according to rule and precept.  Ellen had never, in fact, had a young man make a formal call upon her before.  She reflected now, both with relief and trepidation, that her mother was away, having gone to her aunt Eva’s.  She had an instinct which she resented, that her mother and this young man were on two parallels which could never meet.  Her father was at home, seated in the south door with John Sargent and Nahum Beals and Joe Atkins, but she never thought of such a thing as her father’s receiving a young man caller, though she would not have doubted so much his assimilating with Robert Lloyd.  She understood that the young man might look at her mother with dissent, while she resented it, but with her father it was different.

The group of men at the south door were talking in loud, fervent voices which seemed to rise and fall like waves.  Nahum Beals’s strained, nervous tones were paramount.  “Mr. Beals is talking about the labor question, and he gets quite excited,” Ellen remarked, somewhat apologetically, as she ushered young Lloyd into the parlor.

Lloyd laughed.  “It sounds as if he were leading an army,” he said.

“He is very much in earnest,” said the girl.

She placed painstakingly for her guest the best chair, which was a spring rocker upholstered with crush-plush.  The little parlor was close and stuffy, and the kerosene-lamp, with the light dimmed by a globe decorated with roses, heated the room still further.  This lamp was Fanny’s pride.  It had, in her eyes, the double glory of high art and cheapness.  She was fond of pointing at it, and inquiring, “How much do you think that cost?” and explaining with the air of one who expects her truth to be questioned that it only cost forty-nine cents.  This lamp was hideous, the shape was aggressive, a discordant blare of brass, and the roses on the globe were blasphemous.  Somehow this lamp was the first thing which struck Lloyd on entering the room.  He could not take his eyes from it.  As for Ellen, long acquaintance had dulled her eyes.  She sat in the full glare of this hideous lamp, and Lloyd considered that she was not so pretty as he had thought last night.  Still, she was undeniably very pretty.  There was something in the curves of her shoulders, in her pink-and-white cotton waist, that made one’s fingers tingle, and heart yearn, and there was an appealing look in her face which made him smile indulgently at her as he might have done at a child.  After all, it was probably not her fault about the lamp, and lamps were a minor consideration, and he was finical, but suppose she liked it?  Lloyd, sitting there, began to speculate if it were possible for one’s spiritual nature to be definitely damaged by hideous lamps.  Then he caught sight of a plate decorated with postage-stamps, with a perforated edge through which ribbons were run, and he wondered if she possibly made that.