“Oh Maudie!”
“No, I suppose they won’t,” Maudie admitted.
“Of course,” Julia went on, “mother was right enough when she had those green blinds to match the bedrooms at the back of the house—they were quite good enough for a playroom, but they would be horrid for us. Well, that keeps us down to the idea of a cord for the carpet. We want to look at carpets,” she said to a gentlemanly young man who came up asking her pleasure. “No, nothing so expensive as that,” she continued, casting reflective eyes upon a very beautiful carpet square. “We want something that will be—I think you call them a cord—something in deep blue, or deep crimson, or a rich green.”
“I’m afraid,” said the young man, shaking his head doubtfully, “that we haven’t anything quite in those colors. We have a blue, and we have a terra-cotta. What size, madam?”
Well, I needn’t go through the process of buying a cheap carpet. The transaction ended by the two girls purchasing a carpet which, as Julia remarked, was really almost too ugly for words. It was not an ugly carpet as carpets for that price go—it would have been admirable in a bedroom, but for a sitting-room with a delicate Louis XV paper, with exquisite chintzes to match, it was certainly not a little out of keeping.
“After all, the carpet doesn’t matter,” said Julia, with an air of making the best of it, “so long as it’s unobtrusive and neat.”
“I believe plain felt would have been the best,” said Maudie, eyeing the carpet with much disfavor.
“They don’t wear, do they?” said Julia, appealing to the young man.
“No, a felt carpet doesn’t wear, madam. It sweeps up into a good deal of fluff, and it’s apt to induce moths in the house, and we really don’t find them very satisfactory. It looks very nice at first,” he ended with a flourish, as if their brains were enough to fill up the rest of the sentence.
“Yes, I think so, too. Well, we’ll have it, Maudie, eh? It will do for us to begin with,” she added in a whisper. “Now tell us, where are the blinds?”