“Yes,” said the Doctor, “the only girl we have left, and if she marries there’ll be a massacre around here!”
And then Mrs. Crane came to the door, and I forgot Mary Elinor and the Doctor. She kissed me and said, “Why, my dear little girl!” and I felt as if I had always known her. “Just like your mother,” she went on, “just like Nelly Randolph--the prettiest girl in the Green Spring Valley!” And I saw that her eyes were too bright, and swimming. And then she changed the subject abruptly and said: “Come in, dear. . . . You must be tired. . . . Ted, have Lucky take those bags up to the blue room”--Lucky was the darkest little coon I ever saw--“and,” she went on, “Mary Elinor, you take Miss Natalie upstairs and see that she has clean towels and has a nice chance to brush up, and then come down to supper.”
“Come on,” said Mary Elinor, as she slipped her arm through mine. And we went up some splendid broad, winding stairs which led to a great upstairs hall. It was the loveliest house I’d ever seen. I could only gasp.
There were dark old pictures in beautifully wide, gently mellowed gilt frames, and funny old-fashioned pieces of furniture standing here and there. I particularly noticed one, and Mary Elinor told me it was a frame on which people of our great-great-grandmother’s time did embroidery. . . . And on the floor were rag rugs, in the prettiest colours. They belonged with the old mahogany. I don’t know about periods or anything like that, but I could feel that they fitted.
As we went along, Mary Elinor talked ever so fast. She said that they had always been poor, since people almost never paid the Doctor unless they were awfully sick and wanted him to come again--and most always they were only really sick once. But she said that they had an aunt who gave them a lot of money and that now they were comfortable and had ice-cream as often as three times a week, and two cars, one of which her mother ran. And she has two sisters, and a brother who was visiting then and was going to college. And that little girl is the aunt of two children! A boy and a girl. She said her sister Barbara almost named her baby after her, but it happened to be a boy, and of course a name like Mary Elinor was out of the question. She told me quite a lot as I washed up, and said she wished I would stay, as she missed her sisters and brother and would like to have me around. I thought it was dear of her, and then, as I was ready and awfully hungry, we went downstairs.
And there--I began to understand that it was not all history, geography, French, English, and mathematics that I was to learn in New York. I began to see what I never had seen--or could see--in our little village. That is--the prettier way of living. For even Miss Hooker’s table never looked like Mrs. Crane’s. And Miss Hooker went to the World’s Fair, studied singing in Washington in 1895, and has been as far West as Chicago.
It was lovely. I did wish that Uncle Frank and Bradly-dear could see it! There was a lunch set on it, and the way the table gleamed between the lace edges was beautiful. . . . There were candles with pink shades, and in a high glass basket late autumn roses. . . . Then there were tiny baskets of nuts and candies. . . . I could only look.
I said, “I think that is beautiful, Mrs. Crane!” and she said, “Dear child!” which wasn’t exactly an answer, but which satisfied me. . . . Then we ate, and the things were very good. I did enjoy myself.
They laughed and talked a lot, and we had such a good time. Mrs. Crane and Mr. Crane seem to talk by looking, too, which is queer--and yet, I suppose if you’ve been in the same house with a person for a great many years, and loved them lots, you would understand every little flicker that makes a change in expression, just as I understand what sort of a fly fish will want--from a look at the light and the depth of the water, and the sort of wings the insects have that hover above. . . . Sometimes I think that everything in the world is observation, that that is the only education. And that education perhaps, after all, only tries to make you do that.
I was deeply impressed by the French pastries. Of course, I had never had them before, because almost everyone in Queensburg does their own baking, and there isn’t any bakery nearer than Parsons, and that deals in nothing more involved than macaroons. I asked Mrs. Crane whether she thought that I could get them in New York, and she said I could. I was ever so glad, for I think that if you are very homesick you can be diverted as well by cheerful things to go inside as by cheerful surroundings. I told them so.