Miss Pamela Roscoe lived in a large house freshly painted white, with dark green blinds, chronically closed. To the front door wandered a box-bordered gravel path, and up this avenue Annie Jenkins walked in the red radiance of the September afternoon. Like a good soldier, she had donned her brightest armor, and her muslin skirts flicked in a friendly yet business-like way against the green. She raised the heavy brass knocker, its rattle shook the door and echoed through an empty hall.
Miss Pamela Roscoe heard the sound, and went softly, with no show of haste, to a window that commanded what is, in local parlance, known as a handsome view of the front porch, from which vantage she remarked her visitor through peeping shutters.
But she waited—it is not considered good form in Roscoe to admit a stranger too eagerly—for a decent interval to elapse. Thanks to aunt Mary’s coaching, Annie did not knock again, but stood in pretty decision with her eyes straight before her. A leisurely footstep sounded within; the latch lifted with dignity, the door opened a crack at first, then more widely; and, outlined against a blacker background, stood the tall, stern, forbidding figure of Miss Pamela Roscoe herself!
She was a lady of fateful appearance, black-haired and pale, with a marvelous impression of preservation. Her manner was of the nil admirari sort, and her voice what Annie afterward described as mortuary. The girl murmured her name, a wan smile welcomed her.
“Come right in, Miss Jenkins,” the gloomy voice began, “only I don’t want you should step off that oilcloth. I ain’t going to get that carpet all tracked up. You go right on into the front room”—a gaunt arm pushed her toward a darker space—“and I’ll open up there in a minute.”
Miss Pamela, at the window, threw back the shutter, rolled up a curtain and the western sunlight filled the place. Annie took the chair which her hostess dusted ostentatiously, a stout, wooden rocker with a tidy—Bo-Peep in outline stitch in red—flapping cozily at its back but Miss Roscoe still stood.
“It ain’t hospitable, I know,” her monotone apologized; “a first visit, too—but I’m going to ask you to excuse me a minute right at the set-off. When you knocked, I was buying some berries of the Collamer twins, and just a-measuring of them. I don’t allow no one to measure in my house but myself, if they are my grand-nephews, and I most ought to go back to the summer kitchen to finish and pay ’em—if you don’t mind. There’s the album and last week’s paper, and you just make yourself to home till I get back.”
Left alone, in somewhat austere comfort, Miss Jenkins’ eyes wandered over the room, from the strips of bunting at the windows—black alternating with red, white and blue, which a card in pale, cramped writing explained: “In Memory of Garfield, 1881”—to two elaborate fly-catchers which did duty as chandeliers from vantage points of the ceiling. The simpler, made of straw tied with bows of red worsted, paled before the glories of the other—a structure of silver cardboard in cubes, the smaller depending from the corners of the larger in diminishing effect, ribbon-bound, with a gleaming pearl bead in the center of each.
A pair of strange tables, laden with still stranger ornaments, filled the larger spaces of the floor and bore testimony to the prowess of some pioneer in the line of industrial adornment.