I suppose that her New England conscience and native modesty could not allow even her little daughter to tell her how lovely she really was. I am told that she “had a knack of clothes” and I remember some of them well enough to confirm the opinion. Her taste allowed beautiful materials and much real lace, but of jewels there were none except some brooches that performed useful service and the wedding and engagement rings that held sentiment.
It was a sad thing that just when her dearest wish, that for her own home, was fulfilled, she must leave it and her three babies for some one else to care for. Fortunately her dearly loved, next-older sister was able to take her place.
At the time we built there seemed to be but two styles of architecture in vogue, one square on a four room base and the other oblong on a six room plan, the narrow end being to the street, with one tier of rooms shoved back a little in order to provide a small porch,—we chose the latter. Every such house had a bay window in the projecting end, that being the front parlor, and all windows visible from the street must have yellow, varnished inside blinds.
One evening while the building was going on we went over as usual for our daily inspection and noted that the newly set studding marked the coming rooms. The connecting parlors seemed small to our eyes and tastes not yet trained to apartment and bungalow court proportions, so on the following morning father ordered out the wall between proposed front and back parlor, and our large sitting room,—living room it would be called today, was ordained. It, was unusual in Los Angeles where the prevailing mode demanded the two parlors. This room was large enough, 18’ x 33’, to stand the height of the ceiling, fourteen feet. Wide, high double-doors opened into the hall, opposite similar ones into the reception room, giving a feeling of spaciousness to the house.
The furnishing was of necessity more or less that which it is now customary to damn as mid-Victorian,—walnut furniture and a wealth of varying design in carpet, curtains, upholstery, wall-paper; but the whole in this case was kept in harmony by a key color, a medium olive, relieved by soft shades of rose and tan. Even the woodwork was painted to match the ground color of the walls, instead of glistening in the usual glory of varnished redwood or yellow pine. Everything was in good taste except a fearful and wonderful ceiling that was wished on us by the local wall-papering nabob. How fortunate that the walls were so high it was almost out of sight!
Over our heads were the two plaster of Paris centerpieces from which lighting fixtures sprang, first hanging lamps with prismatic fringes, later gas chandeliers. These fruits and flowers were tinted and gilded. Around them was a cream colored sky, set with golden stars, small ones, not planets,—limited in extent by an oval band of brocaded red velvet, this being the pet aversion of Aunt Martha. Outside this pale there was a field of metallic colored paper with an all-over design like chicken wire; next came a border of flowers and something modest to connect the whole artistic creation with the side wall.
We had a ceiling, but there were many things characteristic of the period that we did not have. We never had a “throw,” nor a gilded milking stool with a ribbon bow on one leg; we never had a landscape painted on the stem of a palm leaf, nor oranges on a section of orange wood; we did not hang in any door a portière made of beads, shells, chenille ropes or eucalyptus seeds, all of which things were abroad in the land.
The room contained four bookcases, a rosewood square piano, a large table, a sofa and several easy chairs. From the walls looked down upon us Pharoah’s Horses, The Stag in the Glen, and the Drove at the Ford, (suitable subjects the vogue provided for a family dependent upon livestock), but these were not all, for there were a few reproductions of old masters, a fine portrait of grandfather in his youth, and a picture of the sweet-faced mother who had gone to Heaven, as we children said.
At one end of the room was a white marble mantel with a large grate, always annoying us by its white patchiness in the low toned room, but contributing cheer with the coal fire that, through more than half the year, burned all day long. Los Angeles had no furnaces in those days, but the family was suited by the single fireplace, for one could choose the climate he wished from torrid zone near the grate to arctic in the bay window, where the goldfish circled their watery globe.
The room was the center of a happy family life, where, of an evening, all read by the light of the student lamp, or indulged in games, dominoes, authors, crambo, or logomachy, sugar-coated ways of getting training respectively in addition, names of books and writers, verse-making and spelling. Father rarely went out, and after the reading of his evening paper might join a lively domino tournament or amuse himself with solitaire.