"Why—why, yes, Mr. Kendrick," she stammered. "I'm so glad you did.... I am so glad to see you.... Ah—ah—— Won't you come in?"
Captain Sears entered the dark front hall. It smelt like most front halls of that day in that town, a combination smell made up of sandal-wood and Brussels carpet and haircloth and camphor and damp shut-up-ness.
"Walk right in, do," urged Mrs. Berry, opening the parlor door. The captain walked right in. The parlor was high-studded and square-pianoed and chromoed and oil-portraited and black-walnutted and marble-topped and hairclothed. Also it had the fullest and most satisfying assortment of whatnot curios and alum baskets and whale ivory and shell frames and wax fruit and pampas grass. There was a majestic black stove and window lambrequins. Which is to say that it was a very fine specimen of a very best parlor.
"Do sit down, Mr. Kendrick," gushed Mrs. Berry, moving about a good deal but not, apparently, accomplishing very much. There had been a feather duster on the piano when they entered, but it, somehow or other, had disappeared beneath the piano scarf—partially disappeared, that is, for one end still protruded. The lady's cotton dusting-gloves no longer protected her hands but now peeped coyly from behind a jig-sawed photograph frame on the marble mantelpiece. The apron she had worn lay on the floor in the shadow of the table cloth. These habiliments of menial domesticity slid, one by one, out of sight—or partially so—as she bustled and chatted. When, after a moment, she raised a window shade and admitted a square of sunshine to the grand apartment, one would scarcely have guessed that there was such drudgery as housework, certainly no one would have suspected the elegant Mrs. Cordelia Berry of being intimately connected with it.
She swept—in those days the breadth of skirts made all feminine progress more or less of a sweep—across the room and swished gracefully into a chair. When she spoke she raised her eyebrows, at the end of the sentence she lowered them and her lashes. She smiled much, and hers was still a pretty smile. She made attractive little gestures with her hands.
"I am so glad you dropped in, Mr. Kendrick," she declared. "So very glad. Of course if we had known when you were coming we might have been a little better prepared. But there, you will excuse us, I know. Elizabeth and I—Elizabeth is my daughter, Mr. Kendrick.... But it is Captain Kendrick, isn't it? Of course, I might have known. You look the sea—you know what I mean—I can always tell. My dear husband was a captain. You knew that, of course. And in the old days at my girlhood home so many, many captains used to come and go. Our old home—my girlhood home, I mean—was always open. I met my husband there.... Ah me, those days are not these days! What my dear father would have said if he could have known.... But we don't know what is in store for us, do we?... Oh, dear!... It's such charming weather, isn't it, Captain Kendrick?"
The captain admitted the weather's charm. He had not heard a great deal of his voluble hostess's chatter. He was there, in a way, on business and he was wondering how he might, without giving offence, fulfill his promise to Judge Knowles and see more of the interior of the Fair Harbor. Of the matron of that institution he had already seen enough to classify and appraise her in his mind.
Mrs. Berry rambled on and on. At last, out of the tumult of words, Captain Sears caught a fragment which seemed to him pertinent and interesting.
"Oh!" he broke in. "So you knew I was—er—hopeful of droppin' in some time or other?"
"Why, yes. Elizabeth knew. Judge Knowles told her you said you hoped to. Of course we were delighted.... The poor dear judge! We are so fond of him, my daughter and I. He is so—so essentially aristocratic. Oh, if you knew what that means to me, raised as I was among the people I was. There are times when I sit here in this dreadful place in utter despair—utter.... Oh—oh, of course, Captain Kendrick, I wouldn't have you imagine that Elizabeth and I don't like this house. We love it. And dear 'Belia Seymour is my closest friend. But, you know——"