A long whistle woke her from her reverie. She looked out; the dusk had softened the countryside until it was a dull blur, shot with irregular streaky lights.
Her husband shouldered briskly back from the smoking car. "This is Hazelton, Mary," he said eagerly. "Adamsville next!"
IV
The Judsons blended easily into the life on the mountain.
Paul took it upon himself to plan and arrange all the details of the new home. Mary found her wishes unconsulted, when furniture was to be placed or purchased.
Much of the furnishings of the Jackson house he used in the new "Hillcrest Cottage." The dining-room suite, with its stately, ornate sideboard and carved chairs, was rearranged in the bay-windowed corner room, overlooking the long vista of Bragg Valley. The diners looked out on the pigmy furnace smokestacks punctuating the dun smoke-mist. The children's rooms, the three chief bedrooms, and the living-room furniture remained unaltered.
Upon the other things, Paul put down his foot. The library set, its antique bookcases and desks curling up toward the ceiling, must be relegated to the attic. The mahogany and bird's-eye maple suite, which had furnished the spare bedroom, must accompany it. The family portraits, the china heirlooms, and the odd judge's musty home library, in the same crates in which they had come from Jackson, were pushed into the odd-shaped angles of the twilight garret. These had no place in the elaborate simplicity of a country home.
The study and library were fitted up afresh in dull quartered oak, with sectional bookcases. New porch chairs and lounges for the wide verandas, Persian rugs for the rooms where the old carpets would not suffice, he listed, viewed, and finally purchased. Mary's heart ached these days as she realized how she had been pushed out of his living.
The phone rang one afternoon. "I'm sending out a rug for the library, Mary. Abramson's promised to get it there before five."