The dining-room was a dreary place. An old sofa that had done noble duty in the family when Cornelia was a baby lounged comfortably at one side, a catch-all for overcoats, caps, newspapers, bundles, mending, anything that happened along. Three of the dining-room chairs were more or less gone or emaciated in their seats. The cat was curled up comfortably in the old wooden rocker that had always gone by the name of “Father’s rocker,” and wore an ancient patchwork cushion. The floor was partly covered by a soiled and worn Axminster rug whose roses blushed redly still behind wood-colored scrolls on an indiscriminate background that no one would ever suspect of having been pearl-gray once upon a time. The wall-paper was an ugly dirty dark-red, with tarnished gold designs, torn in places and hanging down, greasy and marred where chairs had rubbed against it and heads had apparently leaned. It certainly was not a charming interior. She curled her lip slightly as she took it all in. This her home! And she a born artist and interior decorator!
Her silence and lack of enthusiasm dampened the spirits of the children, who had looked to her coming to brighten the dreary aspect of things. They began to sit around silently and watch her, their keen young eyes presently searching out her thoughts, following her gaze from wall-paper to curtainless window, from broken chair to sagging couch.
“We haven’t been able to get very much to rights,” sighed Louise in a suddenly grown-up, responsible tone, wrinkling her pink young brow into lines of care. “I wanted to put up some curtains before you got here, but I couldn’t find them. Father wouldn’t let me open the boxes till Carey came home to help. He said there was enough around for me to tend to, all alone, now.”
“Of course,” assented the elder sister briefly and not at all sympathetically. In her heart she was thinking that curtains wouldn’t make any difference. What was the use of trying to do anything, anyway? Suppose the beautiful stranger who had been so sure she would make her home lovely could see her now. What would she think? She drew a deep sigh.
“I guess maybe I better go to bed,” said Louise suddenly, blinking to hide a tendency to tears. It was somehow all so different from what she had expected. She had thought it would be almost like having mother back, and it wasn’t at all. Cornelia seemed strange and difficult.
“Yes,” said the father, coming up from the cellar, where he had been putting the erratic furnace to bed for the night; “you and Harry better get right up to bed. You have to get up so early in the morning.”
“Perhaps you’d like to come, too,” said Louise, turning to Cornelia with one more attempt at hospitality. “You know you have to sleep with me; that is I sleep with you.” She smiled apologetically. “There isn’t any other room, you know,” she explained as she saw the look of dismay on Cornelia’s face. “I wanted to fix up the linen-closet for me, but father couldn’t find another cot yet. Harry sleeps on one cot up in a little skylight place in the third story that was only meant for a ladder to go up to the roof. Carey has the only real room on the third floor, and there aren’t but two on the second besides the little speck of a bathroom and the linen-closet.”
A sudden realization of the trouble in the little sister’s eyes and voice brought Cornelia somewhat to her senses.
“That’s all right, chicken,” she said, pinching the little girl’s cheek playfully. “We won’t fight, I guess. I’m quite used to a roommate, you know.”
Louise’s face bloomed into smiles of hopefulness.