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A few days afterward I found myself walking behind her. There is something artful about her skirts by which I always know her, though I can't say what it is. She was carrying an enormous parcel that might have been a bird-cage wrapped in brown paper, and she took it into a bric-a-brac shop and came out without it. She then ran rather than walked in the direction of the sixpenny-halfpenny shop.
The excellence of her education was attested not by the books and pictures but by the absence of those fussy, commonplace draperies and bits of bric-a-brac where with people of no taste and no imagination furnish their houses because they can think of nothing else to fill in the gaps. Many of Jane's ways made Sister Martha uneasy.
The bow-window had been replaced by a plumber's devanture, and one might conceive the bronze to have gravitated to the limbo where Mexican onyx tables and bric-a-brac in buffalo-horn await the first signs of our next aesthetic reaction. Eleanor swept me through a hall that smelled of poverty, up unlit stairs to a bare slit of a room.
"Oh, well " Darrow acquiesced, in the tone of the man who perforce yields to so lovely an unreasonableness. Escape was, after all, impossible, and he could only resign himself to being led to Madame de Chantelle's door. Within, among the bric-a-brac and furbelows, he found Miss Painter seated in a redundant purple armchair with the incongruous air of a horseman bestriding a heavy mount.
If most housekeepers could get rid of one-half their clothes and furniture and put their bric-a-brac in the town museum, life would be simplified and they would begin to know what leisure means. When I see so many of our American women struggling to be artists, who cannot make a good loaf of bread nor a palatable cup of coffee, I think of what Theodore Parker said when art was a craze in Boston.
I went placidly on now casting a passing glance on exhibitions of stale confectionery, now on a display of attractive millinery, again it was a "ten cent" establishment, offering such bargains as might puzzle the most economical house-wife, and finally my attention was caught by a succession of dazzling windows, with their bewildering panorama of Japanese figures and coloured bric-a-brac, windows crowded with fans and parasols, and variegated lamp-shades, oriental trays and glove-boxes, pieces of ware, from whose dirty green surface emptily peered the pale faces of native Japanese, there were whisk-holders, and wall-baskets, and all sorts of ornaments trimmed in Japanese fabrics, looking coaxingly out at the public.
Ten years before she would have lain down and slept, but now she had a feeling that things needed watching: maids were cleaning down-stairs, bric-a-brac was all over the floor, and there were sure to be grocery-men that had to be talked to imperatively and then there was a letter to write Donald, who was fourteen and in his first year away at school.
Her brother turned, considered her with patronising toleration, then shrugged his shoulders. "You look like one, but you're no good," he said. "I can be just as bad as any boy!" she insisted. "I'll do whatever you do; I'll do worse, I tell you. Dare me to do something!" "You don't dare skate backward into the red drawing-room! There's too much bric-a-brac."
The late lamented Dusommerard tried his best to gain Pons' confidence, but the prince of bric-a-brac died before he could gain an entrance to the Pons museum, the one private collection which could compare with the famous Sauvageot museum. Pons and M. Sauvageot indeed resembled each other in more ways than one.
"A cold in the head!" she exclaimed. "Well, if I catch it, it won't be the first time. I know how to blow my nose." "But you might also get the pimples." At this the nurse burst into laughter so loud that the bric-a-brac rattled. "Oh, oh, oh! Dear lady, let me tell you, we ain't city folks, we ain't; we don't have such soft skins. What sort of talk is that?
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