“That may be,” said Bertha, who had beckoned to the girls to follow quickly, “but my friends are from the city, as you suspected, and they don’t often have a chance in New York to see a parlour like yours, Miss Bender.”
As Bertha had intended, this bit of flattery mollified the old lady, and she followed her guests along the dark hall.
“Well, if you’re bound to have it so,” she said, “do wait a minute, and let me get in there and pull up the blinds. It’s darker than Japhet’s coat pocket. I haven’t had this room opened since Mis’ Perkins across the road had her last tea fight. And I only did it then, ’cause I wanted to set some vases of my early primroses in the windows, so’s the guests might see ’em as they came by. Seems to me it’s a little musty in here, but land! a room will get musty if it’s shut up, and what earthly good is a parlour except to keep shut up?”
As Miss Bender talked, she had bustled about, and thrown open the six windows of the large room, into which Bertha had taken the girls.
The sunlight streamed in, and disclosed a scene which seemed to Patty like a wonderful vision of a century ago.
And indeed for more than a hundred years the furniture of the great parlour had stood precisely as they now saw it.
The furniture was entirely of antique mahogany, and included sofas and chairs, various kinds of tables, bookcases, a highboy, a lowboy and other pieces of furniture of which Patty knew neither the name nor the use.
The pictures on the wall, the ornaments, the books and the old-fashioned brass candlesticks were all of the same ancient period, and Patty felt as if she had been transported back into the life of her great-grandmother.
As she had herself a pretty good knowledge of the styles and varieties of antique furniture, she won Miss Bender’s heart at once by her appreciation of her Heppelwhite chairs and her Chippendale card-tables.
“You don’t say,” said Miss Bender, looking at Patty in admiration, “that you really know one style from another! Lots of people pretend they do, but they soon get confused when I try to pin ’em down.”