The mail maiden smiled a contemptuous smile; her black eyes held like sediment the look of repudiation.
"Ah, door-knobs!"—scornfully. "What's the use Of givin' up your curios and souvenirs to folks like that? They don't know how to appreciate it! I got a better use for my door-knobs. They 'm peculiar, them two is; they don't know nothin'. You heard that about the bedrooms, I presume?"
Mr. Pawket, a worried look settling on his kind face, peered up at the Rural; he took off his sun-hat and fanned himself with it.
"The bedrooms?" he questioned, falteringly. "D' ye mean that comical cage-like where they goin' to sleep outdoors?"
The Rural smiled scornfully; she adjusted the pink rosebud with a haughty, gauntleted hand.
"I mean the walls," shortly. "Plaster walls. Yes, sir, that's what I mean and I know what I'm talkin' about—rough walls, plaster, like a cellar. I know what I'm talkin' about, for it's my intended has the job; he's 'most crazy about it, my intended is, it's gone all over the Center and every one laughin' and teasin' him about it.... She's wrote it herself in a letter with that same honey-bee onto the envelope. 'I want the bedroom walls to be rough plaster,' that's what she's went and wrote, 'of a pale yellow colorin' Mr. Badgely will choose. Please allow him to mix the color' (ain't it awful?) 'and put it on very rough' (she says). 'I want the grain especially coarse and rich' (she says). 'Coarse and rich'!" The Rural lifted dramatic eyes, inquiring again, "Ain't that terrible?"
Mr. Pawket hesitated. An idea of loyalty possessed him; he made a feeble attempt at seeming to support the unknown lady's taste.
"Er course, as I look at vanillas—" he began, weakly.
But the Rural interrupted him with a vicious clip of her lean brown jaws. "Vanillas?" with scornful inflection. "Vanillas?" She lashed the white horse into a sprawling stagger as she snapped, "She don't know nothin' about vanillas!" and rattled confidently away, calling back, scornfully; "She don't know nothin'; she 'ain't never had no instruction; she don't reelize that there's such things as wall-papers. 'Coarse and rich,'" sneered the Rural. She peered back over her trim young shoulder, adding: "They say their furniture has come. Everybody is down to the junction, studyin' it. I'm glad it ain't mine."
It was true that the furniture had arrived. Braving the vicissitudes of sea routes; badly shipped by an Italian warehouse, and roughly handled at an American port, still the furniture had arrived. It had been dumped out of its crated cars at the little Brook Center station. To the lover of Flemish and Spanish carving, to the connoisseur of Genoese cabinets and Italian intarsia, to the student of time-fumed designs and forms, the coming of this furniture might well have been an event; for by a freak of destiny, on the little platform of an obscure country junction were assembled the hoardings of centuries of tradition, the adored heirlooms of a long line of ancestry. One huge case, half wrecked, showed the gleam of Florentine brasses; another, crated and roped, revealed faded Genoese brocades; slender broken legs and edges of carved flaps protruded from battered sheathings. To some minds all this might have spelled a certain sort of poetry; to the curious group assembled at the junction it spelled eccentricity and, what was worse, a fixed and immoral shabbiness of existence!