But it had not soured him: it had only saddened him, and made him reticent.

In his own quiet way, he went slowly on, adding each year some new touch of simple adornment to their home.
Every dollar he could spare out of his earnings went into something for the eye to feast on; and, in spite of the old people's perpetual grumbling and perpetual antagonism, it came about that they grew to be, in a surly fashion, proud of Stephen's having made their home unlike the homes of their neighbors.
"That's Stephen's last notion.

He's never satisfied without he's sticking up suthin' new or different," they would say, as they called attention to some new picture or shelf or improvement in the house.

"It's all tom-foolery.

Things was well enough before." But in their hearts they were secretly a little elate, as in latter years they had come to know, by books and papers which Stephen forced them to hear or to read, that he was really in sympathy with well-known writers in this matter of the adornment of homes, the love of beautiful things even in every-day life.
A little more than a year before the time at which our story begins, Stephen's father had died.