And then—clandestinely down behind the backs of the chairs! And not on the cheek! Exact style of the respondent not accurately known—probably early Elizabethan.
Toward the middle of the afternoon as they played further about the room in search of whatever entertainment it afforded, they stopped before an old cabinet with shelves arranged behind glass doors.
On one of the upper shelves stood some little oval frames of blue or of rose-colored velvet; and in the frames were miniatures of women of old Southern days with bare ivory necks and shoulders and perhaps a big damask rose on the breast or pendent in a cataract of curls behind the ear: women who made you think what must have been the physical and mental calibre of the men who had captured them and held them captured: Elizabeth's grandmothers and aunts on the mother's side. The two girls, each with an arm around the other's waist and heads close together, peered through the glass doors at the vital dames.
"Don't they look as though they liked to dance and to eat and to manage everything and everybody?" said Elsie, always practical.
"Don't they look proud!" said Elizabeth proudly, "and true! and don't they look alive!"
But she linked her arm in Elsie's and drew her away to something else, adding in delicate confidence: "I think I am glad, though, Elsie, that mamma does not look like them. There is no one in the world like mamma! I am a little like her, but I dwindled. Children do dwindle nowadays, don't they?"
"Not I," said Elsie. "I didn't dwindle. Do you notice any dwindling anywhere about me? Please say where."
On the middle and lower shelves of the cabinet were some long-ago specimens of mounted wild duck; and on the moss-ragged boughs of an artificial oak some age-moulted passenger pigeons. The boys talked about these, and told stories of their grandfathers' hunting days when pigeons in multitudes flecked the morning sky on frosty mornings or had made blue feathery clouds about the oak trees in the vast Kentucky pastures.
Following this lead, the boys went to the book-shelves, and taking down a volume of Audubon's great folio work on American Birds, they spread it open on the carpet and, sprawling before it, found the picture of the vanished wild pigeon there, and began to read about him.