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An' John, you call into Cousin Ad'line Marlow's an' see how they all be, an' tell her I expect her over certain to stop awhile before hayin'. It always eases her phthisic to git up here on the high land, an' I've got a new notion about doin' over her best-room carpet sence I see her that'll save rippin' one breadth.
It had been the possibilities in a piece of crayon. All through childhood the boy had drawn his beloved "pictures" on every inviting space that offered, whether it were the "best-room" wall-paper, or the fly leaf of the big plush album, and at eighteen he had announced his determination to be an artist.
An' then when everything was ready Calliope's dress done an' layin' on their best-room bed, the minister stayin' home from conference to perform the ceremony, even the white cake made off goes Calvert Oldmoxon with Martha Boughton, a little high-fly that had just moved to town. A new girl can marry anything she wants in Friendship if she does it quick.
On one side of this hall was the "best bedroom," ghostly with tightly-closed white shutters and long white dimity curtains to the "four-poster" and shining white sanded floor, and the "best-room," terrible in its grandeur of cold white walls, straight hard sofa, "spider-legged" table, grenadier-like chairs and striped woolen carpet underlaid with straw.
On Sarah's advent into the family the dismal "best-room" was made habitable by the addition of a "four-poster" which Mrs. Starbuck senior regretted was only of cherry-wood and not carved and by sundry little feminine contrivances of Sarah's own. I said that for a time all seemed to go on happily in this humble home.
When he followed presently, shouldering her trunk into the upper best-room, and kneeling upon the floor to unbuckle the straps, she found herself wondering: "Is this a knightly service, or the menial duty of a porter? Can a man be both sensitive and ignorant, chivalrous and vulgar?"
We found my mother's room made very neat, and very grand, too, I thought, with the shaded lamp and the great armchair from the best-room below; and my mother, now composed, but yet flushed with expectation, was raised on many snow-white pillows, lovely in the fine gown, with one thin hand, wherein she held a red geranium, lying placid on the coverlet. "I am ready, David," she said to my father.
You beat up that cushion, an' throw open the best-room door. My soul! if your grandpa's goin' to set the whole town by the ears, I wisht he'd come home an' fight his own battles!" Hattie did not look at her young daughter; but if she had looked, she might have been amazed. Mary stood firm as iron; she was more than ever a chip o' the old block.
Some deftly carved boxes and figures of chamois and their hunters stood on Carlen's best-room mantel, much admired by her neighbors, and longed for by her toddling girl, these, and a bunch of dried and crumbling blossoms of the Ladies' Tress, were all that had survived the storm. The dried flowers were in the largest of the boxes.
However, scarcely a woman in Upham but would have been willing to be a legitimate mourner for the sake of investigating the mysterious best-room, which had had a certain glory in the time of the lawyer's mother. A great wreath of white flowers lay on the coffin. Its breathless sweetness clung to the nostrils and seemed to fill the whole house.
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