Miss Pinckney, having shown Phyl out, looked round the room as if to make sure that all the familiar ghosts were in their places, then she shut the door with a snap, and turning, led the way upstairs murmuring to herself, and with the exalted and far away look which she wore when put out.
Phyl’s room lay on the first landing, a bright and cheerful room papered with a rather cheap flower and sprig patterned paper, spring-like for all its cheapness, and just the background for children’s heads when they wake up on a bright morning.
A bowl of flowers stood on the dressing-table, and the open window shewed across the verandah a bit of the garden, where the cherokee roses were blooming.
“This is your room,” said Miss Pinckney. “It’s one of the brightest in the house, and I hope you’ll like it— Listen!”
Through the open window came the chime of church-bells.
“It’s the chimes of St. Michael’s. You’ll never want a clock here, the bells ring every quarter, just as they’ve rung for the last hundred years; they’re the first thing I remember, and maybe they’ll be the last. Well, come on and I’ll show you some more of the house, if you’re not tired and don’t want to rest.”
She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the attics.
The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly through the years and assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders of the Parthenon knew this, the builders of Vernons did not— Age supplied their defects.
Up here the flooring of the passages and rooms frankly sagged in places, and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed.
“I’ve seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days,” said Miss Pinckney. “We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn’t seen of American history isn’t worth telling—much. Here’s the nursery.”