Sometimes their frank inquisitiveness amused, at other times it annoyed me.
I had been there a month; the weather had grown too warm to permit a fire in the evening, and the sitting room looked dismal with its one small kerosene lamp, around which the moths fluttered, and singed their foolish wings, nearly obscuring the light.
“Drat the things,” said grandma, from time to time.
Heavy clouds lay low in the west, and the occasional low growling of thunder indicated the coming of a storm; the breeze scarcely lifted the muslin curtain at the window.
A rush of homesickness came over me; the gloom depressed me, and left me wretched; the sultry atmosphere seemed unbearable; the quaint, low-ceiled rooms seemed suffocating, and detestably ugly, and I wondered that I could have thought them so charming.
I hurried away to my room, which was at the further end of the house, to hide my tears. The long, draughty hall seemed filled with lurking shadows; I thought it endless, and was sure that the doors were opening on either side as I passed. I dashed open the door of my own room, and for a few breathless minutes crouched in the corner most thoroughly frightened. Presently, ashamed of my childish terror, I arose and lighted my lamp.
I could not shake off the frightened feeling; the dim, uncertain light of the small lamp left the corners of the room in wavering gloom; the gathering clouds sent out their advance signals—a fitful gust of moist wind—now and then, which suddenly flapped the curtain at the window as though shaken by an angry hand, and swayed the old-fashioned valance to the bed until I felt ready to scream.
I closed the blinds, turned the blaze of the lamp still higher, endeavoring to make the room look cheerful. Ah, well! The cheerfulness oftener comes from within than without, and I was nervously depressed and homesick.
I was in that restless mood in which everything is irksome. I wished to write, I could not; a thousand elusive fancies floated by me like thistledown; my mind reached out to grasp them—a tantalizing caprice of the brain, a feeling of mental inadequacy—and they were gone into the realm of the goblin, Incompetent.
I threw down the pen: “What a strange thing the brain is! At times docile and obedient; again, willful, elusive, exasperating; a thing over which one has no control,” I cried angrily.