A lady with a gentle, sallow face and a faded black cotton gown, opened the door. Her hair hung in depressed but genteel ringlets on each side of her countenance; at the back it formed a scant coil upheld by a comb. Tom thought he observed a gleam of hope in her eye when she saw them. She spoke with the accent of Virginia.
“Yes, suh, we have rooms disengaged. Won’t you come in?” she said.
She led them into a neat but rather painful little parlour. The walls were decorated with photographs of deceased relatives in oval frames, and encased in glass there was a floral wreath made of hair of different shades and one of white, waxen-looking flowers, with a vaguely mortuary suggestion in their arrangement. There was a basket of wax fruit under a shade on the centre table, a silver ice-water pitcher on a salver, and two photograph albums whose binding had become loosened by much handling. There was also a book with a red and gold cover, bearing in ornate letters the title “Life of General Robert Lee.”
“The rooms are not lawge,” the lady said, “but they are furnished with the things I brought from my fawther’s house in Virginia. My fawther was Judge Burford, of the Burford family of England. There’s a Lord Burford in England, we always heard. It is a very old family.”
She looked as if she found a vague comfort in the statement, and Tom did not begrudge it to her. She looked very worn and anxious, and he felt it almost possible that during the last few months she might not always have had quite enough to eat.
“I never thawt in the days when I was Judge Burford’s dawtah of Burfordsville,” she explained, “that I should come to Washington to take boarders. There was a time when it was thawt in Virginia that Judge Burford might reach the White House if he would allow himself to be nominated. It’s a great change of circumstances. Did you want board with the rooms?”
“Well——” began Tom.
She interrupted him in some little hurry.
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be convenient for me to board anyone,” she said; “I’ve not been accustomed to providing for boarders, and I’m not conveniently situated. If—if you preferred to economize——”
“We do,” said Tom. “We have come to look up a claim, and people on that business are pretty safe to have to economize, I’ve been told!”