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She had lost her air of being afraid I might patronize her, and explained pantingly that she had come on an errand, not to call. "I'm at my Christmas presents now," she said, "and I've fixed on a bedroom set for Miss Emily. I suppose you won't care if I go right up and measure the dresser-top, will you?" I took her up, and her sharp eyes roved over the stairs and the upper hall.
Allan called cheerily up from the stair-foot. John, casting collars automatically from suitcase to dresser-top, growled. "Congratulations! I need prayers more!" he said under his breath. "But poor little thing! I might as well have stepped on a kitten! ... I certainly did tell her to hope for better things and they'd come.... I didn't know I was going to be one of 'em!"
Her heavy bronze-gold braids swung forward, and their ends coiled down on the dresser-top. Between them her little pointed face looked straight at her, blue-eyed, red-lipped, and serious. Its owner eyed it perplexedly awhile, then gave up the riddle. "If you look like pictures and poetry you do, and that's all there is to it.
Some soiled clothing lay in a heap in one corner; a pair of trousers were collapsed over the back of a chair; the dresser-top held a lot of linen and cravats, both clean and soiled; half-closed drawers overflowed with garments that had been thrust in any way, and an over-turned ink bottle on a handsome mahogany stand had never been righted.
There she stopped before her dresser mirror, and looked at the flushed, breathless girl in the glass. "I wonder," Joy said aloud, "what really is the difference between me and other people?" She stared into the glass to see if she couldn't find out, leaning her hands down on the dresser-top. But the pretty white-enamel-framed mirror showed her just the same Joy as ever.
It was clear that she felt a sort of resentment at not recognizing the young and smiling woman in the old walnut frame, but a moment later she was measuring the dresser-top, her mind set on Christmas benevolence. However, before she went out, she paused near the photograph. "It's queer," she said. "I've been in this room about a thousand times, and I've never noticed it before.
He caught at the dresser-top as though some one had struck him, staring down at the card in his hand, and then around the silent room, his breath grown rapid. At first the words were almost meaningless; then the blood came surging up into his face, and he walked toward the door. There he paused, his hand already upon the knob. What use? What use?
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