Martha twinkled at the invitation.
"Oh, I just love to look at plans!" she said. "I just love to think about people's houses. I was thinking, if ever I'm a reformer, do you know what I'm going to reform? Everybody's closets!"
Wasn't she lovely, sitting there innocently, Emily thought. No wonder they admired her, all of them.
"You come and reform all my closets," the stranger said. But Mrs. Wright said: "Don't look at mine till I've had a chance to go over them. You've made me a lot of trouble, Martha. The girls won't give me a minute's peace now till I let them start doing their rooms over."
When Emily, having dismissed the visitors, turned from the hall into her living room, the sight of these familiar things almost shocked her. They stirred her, at least, to question the very room she had for years taken for granted. The glamour of that room upstairs seemed to make the rest of the house faded, some way. The living room she had always sat down in with satisfaction. Now it looked—timid—meager—insipid—unexpectant. Its walls and its woodwork were almost the color of its neutral light pongee curtains. Those were good rugs on the oak floor. They were rich, and they were mellow. Emily had bought them recklessly with a large share of the first installment of her inheritance, when she had moved back to the house when Martha was a small girl, and she had never regretted her fling. The davenport and the two chairs that went with it, those most comfortable monstrosities, had been done once in blue corduroy. Well, it was still corduroy. That was about all that could be said for it. But its blue dullness some way had seemed to match the rugs. That was a good table. No one bought a table like that in any town in Illinois. Nor was there a desk like that, which plainly had been cherished for some generations. And how infinitely superior were the pictures on the wall to most of the pictures on the walls of that town. Emily's grandfather, once the Governor of the sprawling infant state of Illinois, had brought that engraving of Mt. Vernon sentimentality to the wilderness because he remembered his mother holding her successive babies up to see the dogs and horses that surrounded the father of his country, who stood in a declamatory attitude on the very brink of the Potomac, with his women folk and youthful intimates hovering pictorially about him.
Emily used to compare that picture, chuckling, to the picture of Boston which one of her neighbors had made for herself, upon her return from a memorable visit there. Mrs. Jennings was chairman of the art committee and a busy woman, and hadn't time to "do" many pictures, she said. So she just put everything she wanted to remember into one. And Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and the Common, Longfellow's house and Faneuil Hall, jostled one another in a staggered and staggering row all across the foreground. And there was Mrs. Johnson's parlor. Every time Emily went into it she used to say: "Well, my aunt might have been worse. She didn't paint at least, thank God!" She had left no bilious works of her brush behind her, and she deserved credit for it, considering the fashion of her day. She had left a cherished large framed photograph of the door of St. Mark's. Emily could recall exactly the tone in which she used to say "The portal of St. Mark's," for she had always added "by the sea," which mystified the child. The geography said plainly that all Venice was by the sea. Besides Italy and Mt. Vernon, there were what Emily considered two perfectly lovely large "studies" of Martha's head. A cousin who played with photography had done them when the child was seven years old. She was the cousin who had gathered the child into her arms, on one occasion and cried, "Oh, twinkle, twinkle, little star!" Martha hated them, and pleaded for their banishment, but Emily would not listen to her, not for a minute. There sat a photo of Jim on the desk, and one of his mother, and an early one of his father. And there was, of course, that first seal of a D.A.R. invulnerability, a framed sampler. Altogether, Emily had always been secure that her living room was not just a common small-town room.
But after Martha's—well, what was wrong with it, she sat wondering that morning, a bit ruefully. Some way it was tamed and tolerating. Those high-handed colors upstairs dared the world, and demanded. These young things went raging, commanding, soaring into life. "Not like me," she thought, vaguely. "I just hesitated—and submitted—and got along, some way. How puny I was, and—sort of helpless. That book—I shrank from it as if it had been some great thing. But Eve snubs it. She ignores it. They fly, these children—they just fly. But I rode just a bicycle. And this room wabbles along on a bicycle. I must speed it up. I must—get these things done over—or else I ought to get some new pictures, or something. I better ask Martha, perhaps, to freshen it up a little."
Certainly that stranger had asked Martha's advice. The memory of her respectful tone was wine to Emily. She had to speak to Bob about it. She couldn't just let him go on thinking that Martha "amounted" to nothing.
"I could see that they thought it was wonderful for a girl of her age to have planned it all," she told him. "That woman asked Martha definitely to come and see the plans for her house!"
But he said: "The dickens she did! The kid's got her head swelled enough now, without anybody asking her advice. The dame must be hard up if she's got to come to Martha for advice!"