"Stay for tea, Pearl," Martha was saying. "Father and Mother are away, and there's only Bud and me at home."
Pearl readily agreed. She had told her mother that she probably would not be home for tea. Pearl's social instincts were strong.
Martha took her into the parlour, a close, stuffy little room, and showed some of her treasured possessions. There were the hair-wreath, the seed-wreath, and the wax flowers, which, to Pearl, were triumphs of art. There were three huckaback cushions standing stiff and grand on the high back of the lounge, and another one made of little buns of silk beside them, all far beyond the reach of mortal head.
"Do you never use them, Martha?" Pearl asked, touching them gently. "Do you know, I like cushions that are not half as pretty, but look more friendly like and welcome. But these are just lovely," she added quickly.
An enlarged picture of Mr. Perkins was on one wall, while on the opposite side of the room hung one of Mrs. Perkins.
Pearl told the other children about them when she went home. "There they are," she said, "just glarin' straight at each other, day and night, winter or summer, just the same, neither one of them givin' in an inch. 'I can stare as long as you,' you'd think they was saying, the way they've got their eyes glued on one another; and it ain't cheerful."
A hanging lamp, with its fringe of glittering pendants, hung over a table made of spools like the bookshelves, and covered with a drape of tissue paper table-napkins, cut into a deep fringe around the edge.
The table that held the family Bible had a cover made of rope, hanging in huge tassels down at each corner. Under the carpet had been placed newspapers, to make it wear better, and it crackled noisily as they walked over it. On the window curtains were pinned little calendars and Christmas cards, stuck on ribbons.
To Pearl these decorations were full of beauty, all except the wool wreath, which hung over the lounge in a deep frame covered with glass; but its indigo and mustard coloured roses and swollen bright green leaves made her suspicious that it was not in keeping with the findings of good taste.
There was something in Pearl's sympathetic interest that encouraged
Martha to show her the contents of a cupboard upstairs in her room.