It was not from him that his daughter got her talent, though he had left her his temperament intact of his widow's legal thirds.

He was one of those men of whom the country people say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him.

Mrs.Leighton had long eked out their income by taking a summer boarder or two, as a great favor, into her family; and when the greater need came, she frankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as they call them in the country), and managed it for their comfort from the small quarter of it in which she shut herself up with her daughter.
The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the rounded period.

The fact is, of course, that Alma Leighton was not shut up in any sense whatever.
She was the pervading light, if not force, of the house.

She was a good cook, and she managed the kitchen with the help of an Irish girl, while her mother looked after the rest of the housekeeping.