The spare bedroom was at its gayest in summer-time, when, after the daughters of the house grew up, young company was expected. Swept and dusted and soberly expectant, it waited, like a wise but prudent virgin, with candles unlighted and shutters darkened. Its very colors were cool and decorous, white and green and dark mahogany polish, door knobs and candlesticks gleaming, andirons reflected in the dull-red shine of the hearth.
After sundown, if friends were expected by the evening boat, the shutters were fastened back, and the green Venetian blinds raised, to admit the breeze and a view of the garden and the grass and the plashing fountain. Each girl hostess visited the room in turn on a last, characteristic errand,—one with her hands full of roses, new blown that morning; another to remove the sacrificed leaves and broken stems which the rose-gatherer had forgotten; and the mother last of all to look about her with modest pride, peopling the room with the friends of her own girlhood, to be welcomed there no more.
Then, when the wagon drove up, what a joyous racket in the hall; and what content for the future in the sound of heavy trunks carried upstairs!
If only one girl guest had come, she must have her particular friend of the house for a bedfellow; and what in all the world did they not talk of, lying awake half the summer night in pure extravagance of joy—while the fountain plashed and paused, and the soft wind stirred in the cherry-trees, and in the moonlit garden overblown roses dropped their petals on the wet box-borders.
Visitors from the city brought with them—besides new books, new songs, sumptuous confectionery and the latest ideas in dress—an odor of the world; something complex rich and strange as the life of the city itself. It spread its spell upon the cool, pure atmosphere of the Quaker home, and set the light hearts beating and the young heads dreaming.
In after years came the Far West, with its masculine incense of camps and tobacco and Indian leather and soft-coal smoke. It arrived in company with several pieces of singularly dusty male baggage; but it had not come to stay.
For a few days of confusion and bustle it pervaded the house, and then departed, on the “Long Trail,” taking little Jack and his mother away. And in the chances and changes of the years that followed, they were never again to sleep in the spare bedroom at grandfather’s.
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BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.
The Riverside Press