“I think perhaps it started out to be Mid-Victorian with that general squareness and the porch,” said Mrs. Craig.
“That isn’t Mid-Victorian, Mother darling,” Jean interposed. “That’s the Reaction Period in New England. First of all none of the Puritan Women had any time to sit out on porches, so all the houses were made plain-faced. Then after the war they began to turn their minds to lighter things, so they stuck a cupola up here, and tacked on a little porch there, and gave the windows fancy eyebrows, and little scalloped wooden lace ruffles along the edges of the eaves. Isn’t that so, Becky?”
“Well, I declare, Jeannie,” laughed Becky, “maybe you’re right. I’d say, though, it was mostly a hankering after modernization. I don’t set much store by it myself, so long as I’ve got plenty of flowering shrubs around a house, and climbing vines. That makes me think, you’ve got a sight of them here, flowering quince and almond, and peonies, and all sorts of hardy annuals. There used to be a big border of them, I remember, at the back of the house, and behind it was an old-fashioned rose garden.”
“A rose garden!” Kit and Doris gasped.
“Let’s go and see if we can find it,” cried Jean.
Back they went to find it, and after hunting diligently through hazel bushes and upspringing weeds, they found one terrace that dipped into a sunken space once walled in. Now the tumbled gray rocks had half fallen down, and some were sunken in the earth. But still they found some old rose bushes, and several of the large bushes looked hopeful. There was a flagged walk with myrtle growing up between the stones, and a tumble-down arbor that Tommy declared looked exactly like a shipwrecked pilothouse off some boat.
Doris, sitting down on the broad front steps, was listening to the music of falling water in the distance and the wind overhead in the great, slumberous pines. There were four of these, two on each side of the long terrace, with rock maples down near the rock wall and several pear and cherry trees. Along the terrace were flower beds, three on each one, outlined with clam shells.
“Miss Trowbridge used to have gladiolus set out in those beds, with pansies and sweet alyssum set around the edges, and outside again, old-hen-and-her-chickens. They looked real pretty.”
“Who was Miss Trowbridge, Becky?” asked Mrs. Craig. She sat beside Jean, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, her hat lying beside her. There was a look of content on her face, a look that had been a stranger there for many months. Tommy tossed a spray of half-blossomed cherry twigs in her lap and ran away again.
“She was sister to the Trowbridge that owned the mills. She married some man out in Canada, lived awhile out there, then gave up and died. She never did have much backbone that I could see, but she loved flowers. Did you notice a big glass bay window off the dining room? She called that her conservatory. I remember asking her once if it was her ‘conversationary,’ and how she did laugh at me! Well, every one can’t be expected to know everything. It’s all I can do to keep up with Elmhurst these days. Her name was Francelia and she married a McRae.”