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All about her, warm with candle-light, lay the gracious loveliness of the little room with its dark waxed furniture, its bright glazed chintz, its narrow bed with the cool linen sheets smelling of lavender, and its straight, patterned curtains oh, that hateful, mustard-coloured den at home, with its golden-oak day-bed! She wrung her hands suddenly in a little hunted gesture.
The chairs were as new and shining as chairs could be; there was a "mission style" rocker, a golden-oak rocker, a cherry rocker, heavily upholstered. There was a walnut drop-head sewing-machine on which a pink saucer of some black liquid fly-poison stood. There was a "body Brussels" rug on the floor.
Her voice droned away. They could think of nothing but mean economies as they trudged the wide and magic night of the moors. When they were home, and the familiar golden-oak chairs and tidies blurred their memory of Miss Mitchin's crushing competition, Father again declared that no dinky tea-pot inn could permanently rival Mother's home-made doughnuts.
Cracks in the roof and walls let in an abundance of Arizona atmosphere. The furniture consisted of a slab table that extended all the way through the middle of the room, a wicker chair, and a golden-oak dresser minus the mirror and lacking one drawer. White Mountain looked surprised and relieved, when I burst out laughing.
Then she rose and crossed to the golden-oak piano between the windows, her negligee open its full length and revealing her nightdress; crossed with a slight limp and the dog yapping at the soiled and lacy train; fell to manipulating the self-playing attachment, peddling out a metallic avalanche of popular music.
Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston, seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra slide.
You know, the things didn't look so bad, not so very bad as long as they were new. Tea-cups and saucers gilded like shaving-mugs and equally thick. Golden-oak chairs of mid-Chautauquan patterns, with backs of saw-mill Heppelwhite; chairs of cane and rattan with fussy scrolls and curlicues of wicker, the backs set askew.
They laughed in duet; and before the plate-glass window of a furniture emporium they must stop and regard the monthly-payment display, designed to represent the $49.50 completely furnished sitting room, parlor and dining room of the home felicitous a golden-oak room, with an incandescent fire glowing right merrily in the grate; a lamp redly diffusing the light of home; a plaster-of-Paris Cupid shooting a dart from the mantelpiece; and, last, two figures of connubial bliss, smiling and waxen, in rocking chairs, their waxen infant, block-building on the floor, completing the picture.
They laughed in duet; and before the plate-glass window of a furniture emporium they paused to regard a monthly-payment display, designed to represent the $49.50 completely furnished sitting-room, parlor, and dining-room of the home felicitous a golden-oak room, with an incandescent fire glowing right merrily in the grate; a lamp redly diffusing the light of home; a plaster-of-Paris Cupid shooting a dart from the mantelpiece; and last, two figures of connubial bliss, smiling and waxen, in rocking-chairs, their waxen infant, block-building on the floor, completing the picture.
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