warm, Thea and Tillie papered the room, walls and ceiling in the same
paper, small red and brown roses on a yellowish ground. Thea bought a
brown cotton carpet, and her big brother, Gus, put it down for her one
Sunday. She made white cheesecloth curtains and hung them on a tape. Her
mother gave her an old walnut dresser with a broken mirror, and she had
her own dumpy walnut single bed, and a blue washbowl and pitcher which
she had drawn at a church fair lottery. At the head of her bed she had a
tall round wooden hat-crate, from the clothing store. This, standing on
end and draped with cretonne, made a fairly steady table for her
lantern. She was not allowed to take a lamp upstairs, so Ray Kennedy
gave her a railroad lantern by which she could read at night.
In winter this loft room of Thea’s was bitterly cold, but against her
mother’s advice—and Tillie’s—she always left her window open a little
way. Mrs. Kronborg declared that she “had no patience with American
physiology,” though the lessons about the injurious effects of alcohol
and tobacco were well enough for the boys. Thea asked Dr. Archie about
the window, and he told her that a girl who sang must always have plenty
of fresh air, or her voice would get husky, and that the cold would
harden her throat. The important thing, he said, was to keep your feet
warm. On very cold nights Thea always put a brick in the oven after
supper, and when she went upstairs she wrapped it in an old flannel
petticoat and put it in her bed. The boys, who would never heat bricks
for themselves, sometimes carried off Thea’s, and thought it a good joke
to get ahead of her.
When Thea first plunged in between her red blankets, the cold sometimes
kept her awake for a good while, and she comforted herself by
remembering all she could of “Polar Explorations,” a fat, calf-bound
volume her father had bought from a book-agent, and by thinking about
the members of Greely’s party: how they lay in their frozen
sleeping-bags, each man hoarding the warmth of his own body and trying
to make it last as long as possible against the on-coming cold that
would be everlasting. After half an hour or so, a warm wave crept over
her body and round, sturdy legs; she glowed like a little stove with the
warmth of her own blood, and the heavy quilts and red blankets grew warm
wherever they touched her, though her breath sometimes froze on the
coverlid. Before daylight, her internal fires went down a little, and
she often wakened to find herself drawn up into a tight ball, somewhat
stiff in the legs. But that made it all the easier to get up.
The acquisition of this room was the beginning of a new era in Thea’s
life. It was one of the most important things that ever happened to her.
Hitherto, except in summer, when she could be out of doors, she had
lived in constant turmoil; the family, the day school, the
Sunday-School. The clamor about her drowned the voice within herself. In
the end of the wing, separated from the other upstairs sleeping-rooms by
a long, cold, unfinished lumber room, her mind worked better. She
thought things out more clearly. Pleasant plans and ideas occurred to
her which had never come before. She had certain thoughts which were
like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends. She left
them there in the morning, when she finished dressing in the cold, and
at night, when she came up with her lantern and shut the door after a
