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At a short distance from him, in an ancient straight-backed rocking-chair, dark with age, and clumsy in its antique carvings, sat his wife. Stiffly upright, and with an almost painful primness in dress and figure, she sat knitting rapidly and with closed eyes.
He'll sympathize, I'll bet anything." Whether Bob were really capable of doing this, Cynthia could not tell. She believed he was. Perhaps she really did not intend to go upstairs just then. To his intense relief she seated herself on a straight-backed chair near the door, although she had the air of being about to get up again at any minute.
She had no time, however, to squander on appreciation of artistic atmosphere, however pleasing, and needed to waste none searching for the object of her desires. It faced her, distant not six paces from the door that shameless little "Corot"! resting on the arms of a straight-backed chair. A low laugh of delight on her lips, she went swiftly to the chair and laid hold of the picture by its frame.
Punctilious salutes were exchanged, and then the general, accompanied by some of his officers and also those of the regiment, passed slowly between the long files of straight-backed soldiers. His searching glance seemed to take in everything at once, but so thoroughly had every one prepared that even his exacting eye could find nothing to take exception to.
Delight said this in a high, stilted voice, and as she sat primly in the straight-backed old chair, knitting away at nothing, she presented a funny, attractive little picture. Miss Adams, who had come in search of the girls, paused at the door, and heard Delight's words. "You dear child!" she cried; "you dramatic small person! What are you two doing?"
"Of course not," she agreed, seating herself in one of the straight-backed chairs. Her clasped hands rested on the small round table in the center of the room, while she looked out across the lawn to the dahlias and zinnias on its farther edge.
She sat upright in her straight-backed chair before the table, her eyes half closed. It seemed so odd to see those little work-worn hands idle upon her lap. Joan's present lay on the table near to her, as if she had just folded it and placed it there: the little cap and the fine robe of lawn: as if for a king's child. Joan had never thought that Death could be so beautiful.
Only one day in the week Sunday was Andy allowed the honor of sitting in the best room. Then, for six mortal hours his aching limbs were glued to a straight-backed chair. There, in parlor state, he sat listening to the prim old maid's reading religious works, or some scientific lecture, or a dreary dissertation on good behavior.
Lounging low in a straight-backed chair, with his hands in his pockets and his head wagging obstinately, he was plainly intoxicated, but as yet at a stage sufficiently mild to admit of his recognising the self-evident truth that he needed not another drop. Yet his companions would have him drink more deeply.
"Well, I always used to call her 'Nona. She'd have thought it funny, as you call it, to put anything else. I tell you it's just her way." "Well, I think it's a very funny way and I think anybody else would think so. I don't like her. I never did like her." There seemed no more to say. He walked up to his room. He closed the door behind him and sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs outthrust.
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