“Here’s one of the parlors. We have four on this floor, between big and little. Four parlors and a dining-room. Doesn’t that seem a good many for two lone women?”
The unshaded lamplight showed a crowd of furniture, modern, muffled, expensive, the lack of simplicity in design of which was further rendered dreadful to the artist by every device to make it still less simple, embroidered scarfs thrown over chair-backs, varicolored textiles depending from the mantel-shelf, drooping over the mirror, down pillows of every shape and tint piled in sofa-corners. Nothing was left undecorated. The waste-basket even wore a fat satin bow, like a pet poodle. Every horizontal surface was encumbered with knick-knacks.
“This is where we have people come when we don’t know them very well,” said Mrs. Hawthorne, hardly concealing her pride. “We couldn’t ask the minister to come right upstairs, as we did you. How do you–”
“Mrs. Hawthorne,” came hurriedly from Gerald, “I beg you will not ask me how I like it! It is a peculiarity like–like not liking oysters. I can’t bear to be asked how I like things.”
“How funny! But, then, you’re different from other people, aren’t you? That’s what makes you so interesting.”
She preceded him into the next room, which was not so bad as the first for the reason that, as she explained, “they hadn’t yet finished with it.” He seized the occasion almost eagerly to praise the chairs.
“We found them here when we came,” she informed him. “There was a good lot of furniture of this big, bare sort; 89clumsy, I call it. We stored some of it in the top rooms, but Leslie Foss begged me so to let these stay that we just had the seats covered over with this new stuff and left them.”
When she opened the next door and stepped into the space beyond it seemed as if her lamp had dwindled to a taper, the room was so vast. It had nine great windows, five in an unbroken row on the front of the house the entire width of which it occupied. Aurora’s light was faintly reflected in a polished floor; it twinkled in the myriad motionless drops of two great crystal chandeliers.
“Ah,” exclaimed Gerald in a long sigh. “This is superb!”
“Yes,” she said, “but you might as well try to furnish all outdoors. You see that we haven’t done anything beyond putting up curtains. We never use it. All those chairs along the walls are going to be regilded when we can get them to come and fetch them. Things move awfully slowly over here, don’t they, even if you’re willing to pay.”