With the sisters a certain inborn delicacy of feeling prevented them from formulating, even to themselves, those hopes and aspirations which, nevertheless, lay dormant, needing only a sudden shock to call them into life. When that shock came, and it was known all over the Neighborhood that Madam Van Vorst was dead, the news brought a mild sense of loss, the feeling of a landmark removed; and people hastened at once to the Homestead with sincere condolences and offers of assistance to the daughters. Cornelia and Joanna were stunned, but not entirely with sorrow; rather with the sort of feeling that a prisoner might experience, who finds himself by a sudden blow, released from a chain which habit has rendered bearable, and almost second nature, yet none the less a chain.
It was not till the evening after the funeral that this stifled feeling found expression. The day had been fraught with a ghastly excitement that seemed to give for the moment to these poor crushed beings a fictitious importance. All the Neighborhood had come to the funeral; some grand relations even had journeyed up from town to do honor to the woman whom they had ignored in her lifetime; these last lingered for a solemn meal at the Homestead. The whole affair seemed to bring the Van Vorst women more in contact with the outside world than any event since their father's death, many years before. Sitting that evening, talking it all over, it might have been some festivity that they were discussing, were it not for their crape-laden gowns, and the tears they were still shedding half mechanically, though with no conscious insincerity.
"It was kind of the Schuyler Van Vorsts to come up," said Cornelia, wistfully. "I thought they had quite forgotten us—they are such fine people, you know—but they were really very kind, quite as if they took an interest."
"I'm glad the cake was so good," said the practical Joanna. "I took special pains with it, for I thought some of them might stay."
"It went off very nicely," said Cornelia, tearfully, "very nicely indeed. Mrs. Schuyler Van Vorst spoke of the cream being so good."
"She ate a good deal of it, I noticed."
"One thing I was sorry for," said Cornelia, reluctantly. "I saw her looking at the furniture. You know poor Mamma never would have anything done to it."
The sisters looked mechanically about the familiar room whose deficiencies had never been so glaringly apparent. The Homestead drawing-room had been re-furnished, with strict regard to economy many years ago, after a fashion too antiquated to be beautiful, and too modern to be interesting. The chairs and sofa were covered with horse-hair, and decorated, at intervals, with crochet anti-macassars. In the centre of the room stood a marble-topped table, upon which were ranged, at stiff angles, the Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, and several books of sermons. There were no other books and no pretty knick-knacks; but some perennially blooming wax flowers, religiously preserved beneath a glass case, contrasted with the chill marble of the mantel-piece. Above them hung one of the few relics of the past—a hideous sampler worked by a colonial ancestress. The room was much the worse for wear, the wall-paper was dingy, the carpet faded to an indefinite hue, some of the chairs were notoriously unsafe, and the sofa had lacked one foot for years.
"I think," said Cornelia, with sudden energy, as if roused at last to the truth of a self-evident proposition, "I think it is about time that the room was done over."
Joanna attempted no denial; but after a moment she remarked tentatively, as if balancing the claims of beauty against those of economy; "Some pretty sateen, I suppose, for a covering would not cost much."