It was not that the room itself was so remarkable as that it struck me as being confusingly different from the heavily comfortable rooms of the old Starkweather house with their crowded furnishings, their overloaded mantels, their plethoric bookcases.
“I cannot think of you yet,” I stumbled, “as being here.”
“Isn't it like me?”
“It is a beautiful room—” I groped lamely.
“I was afraid you would say that.”
“But it is. It really is.”
“Then I've failed, after all.”
She said it lightly enough, but there was an undertone of real disappointment in her voice.
“I'm in rather the predicament,” I said, “of old Abner Coates. You probably don't know Abner. He sells nursery stock, and each spring when he comes around and I tell him that the peach trees or the raspberry bushes I bought of him the year before have not done well, he says, with the greatest astonishment, 'Wal, now, ye ain't said what I hoped ye would.' I see that I haven't said what you hoped I would.”
It was too serious a matter, however, for Mary Starkweather to joke about.