Charlotte didn’t mean the nails; she threw open a closet door and ancestral Ransomes, neatly set against the walls, peered out of the dark.
Alexina put a hand over Charlotte’s on the door knob. Molly yawned.
“It seems chilly here in my room,” said Charlotte; “the sun isn’t round this side yet. Put your hats on the bed and Mrs. Garnier shall go lie on Willy’s sofa.”
They followed her across the hall. “He has his bed and things in there,” she explained, nodding towards an adjoining room, “and he keeps his books and such in here.”
On the floor, otherwise uncarpeted, lay a bearskin. There was a sofa against the wall and a plain deal table in the centre of the room, piled with papers, books and pipes, about a lamp. There were some chairs; a gun-rack, antlers, an alligator skin and some coloured prints of English hunting scenes on the walls, and an old-fashioned, brass-mounted cellarette hung in an angle. The south window looked out across the grove upon Nancy; between the two east windows stood an old secretary book-case.
Charlotte suggesting that Mrs. Garnier put on a wrapper, the two went back to her bed-room. Alexina stood hesitating. She felt a sense of surreptitiousness and embarrassment, and then took a step to the book-case—any one might do that much—and read the titles of the books.
About orange culture and fertilizing these first seemed to be, and those next were concerned with the breeding of stock. They meant Woodford and the future, probably. She skipped to the other shelves. Buckle’s Introduction to the History of Civilization, Hallam’s Middle Ages, Wealth of Nations, Wilhelm Meister, Poems of Heinrich Heine, several volumes of Spencer and Huxley, Slaves of Paris, Lecocq, the Detective, File No. 118, The Lerouge Case, The Scotland Yard Detective, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Taxidermitology, Renan’s Life of Jesus, Pole on Whist, Hoyle, Tom Sawyer, Past and Present, Pickwick Papers, Herodotus, an unbroken shelf of Walter Scott, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Cousin Pons, Drainage, Pendennis, Small Fruit Culture.
Why, here was a world, within these glass doors, she did not know. Yet she had read diligently among Uncle Austen’s books. She looked back in memory over his shelves; Macaulay, yes, Uncle Austen cared so essentially for Macaulay, and for Bancroft and Prescott, and Whittier and Lowell. There were the standards in fiction and poetry in well-bound sets. Uncle Austen himself admired Alexander Pope, and Franklin’s Autobiography; he liked Charles Reade’s novels, too, bearing on institutional reforms—
Here Mrs. Leroy and Molly came back, Molly in a white wrapper and Charlotte bearing a pillow and a silk quilt.
“Willy’s calling,” Charlotte told Alexina; “he wants you.”