She turned her eyes resolutely from the window, and they began to wander over the dull lodging-house bedroom.
There was a high mahogany chest of drawers opposite the bed, its top concealed by a crocheted cover in coarse cotton, of doubtful whiteness. Above it hung a picture of a lady with a crinoline, a pink tarlatan dress, and long ringlets, her head drooping at the appropriate angle for stroking the inevitable dove.
Curtains of cretonne, with a hopeless design in crimson on a drab ground, hung in a corner of the room over a row of dress pegs. In the fireplace there was a paper screen, representing a sylvan landscape ornamented with swans.
The dressing-table was adorned by several woolly mats of a violent green shade; and on the mantel-piece there was a row of mourning cards with chaste designs of silver urns, willows, and weeping angels. Bridget gazed at them all with weary indifference. “What am I to do with this day, and to-morrow, and Monday? Three whole days to be passed between this room and the next, if it rains like this all the time,—and it probably will. At least there are the children on working days. I wish there were no holidays. When you’re working you can’t think. The sole use of Saturday and Sunday, as far as I can see, is to make one glad of Monday. It seems an expensive way of forcing one to recognize the blessings of employment.”
She rose listlessly from her little narrow bed.
“I must begin the day some time, I suppose,” she said, half aloud, as she twisted up her loosened hair before the glass, “though why, I don’t know. There’s absolutely no point in it.”
All the time she was dressing the monotonous drip, drip, drip of the rain made a tearful accompaniment to her gray thoughts.
When she was ready, she opened her bedroom door, and entered the room next to it facing the stairs. She rang the bell, and sat down in the bow window to wait for breakfast.
The cloth was already laid on a round table in the middle of the room. It was much too long, and touched the floor all round. A plated cruet, with most of the plate worn off, stood in the middle of the table. There was a cracked teapot-stand near the edge, behind which a thick glass sugar basin and one white cup and saucer stood sentinel. A crooked knife and one yellow fork were disposed at opposite angles at some little distance from the solitary teacup.
Bridget glanced drearily at these appetizing preparations for breakfast, then at the empty grate, and shivered. It was early autumn, and Mrs. Fowler hadn’t begun fires yet. A paper fan covered with bunches of aggressively yellow primroses stood in the fender.