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Miss Avilda tottered into the darkened sitting-room and sank on to a black haircloth sofa, while Samantha ushered the wanderers into the sunny kitchen, muttering to herself: "Wall, I vow! travelin' over the country all alone, 'n' not knee-high to a toad! They're send in' out awful young tramps this season, but they sha'n't go away hungry, if I know it."
Jerome, whose tastes were as yet only imitative and departed not from the lines to which they had been born and trained, surveyed it with astonishment and some contempt. "No carpet," he thought, "and no haircloth sofa, and no rocking-chair!"
Then the young man stepped into a room which was pretty in spite of itself. There was an old Brussels carpet with an enormous rose pattern. The haircloth furniture gave out gleams like black diamonds under the light of the lamp. In a corner stood a what-not piled with branches of white coral and shells. Annie's grandfather had been a sea-captain, and many of his spoils were in the house.
The bare loneliness of the place was accentuated by the depressing furniture, which belonged to the black walnut and haircloth period. On the marble-topped table, in the exact centre of the room, was a red plush album, flanked on one side by a hideous china vase, and on the other by a basket of wax flowers under a glass shade. Her home-coming!
And it happened that a point of the haircloth scratched his lip deeply, with a long trickling of blood upon the chin. It was as if the sight of blood transported the spectators with a kind of mad rage, and suddenly revealed to them the truth. The pretended hunting of the unholy creature became a real one, which brought out, in rapid increase, men's evil passions.
The two women began to work, and almost at once Agnes was herself again, stepping about briskly, restored by the familiarity of being once more under the direction of another. They pulled out the long haircloth sofa, moved the spindle-legged old chairs into the dining-room, and carried out one by one the drawers from the high-boy in the corner. From one of these drawers a yellowed paper fell out.
On two of the haircloth chairs rested a coffin. The baby hands clutched the side he drew himself up on tiptoe and looked down at the still, white face the face of his mother. Her hands were crossed just so, and in her fingers was a spray of flowers he recognized them as the flowers she had always worn on her Sunday bonnet a rusty black bonnet not real flowers, just "made" flowers.
Of course mother wanted to know; and she would be very thankful to me if I could tell her. I went out the front door, and thought deeply on the situation. The windows were wide open, but I was far below them and I could only hear a sort of murmur. Why can't people speak up loud and plain, anyway? Of course they would sit on the big haircloth sofa.
Why there was as many as six families that got enough money for the rubbage in their garrets to furnish their houses all over with brand new things real shiny, hand-painted stuff, not haircloth ruins with music box springs, nor platters that you had to put a pan under for fear of losing cargo. I don't know who fetched the disease to the Old Home House.
He had moved into Harmony's adjacent room and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth sofa at the foot of Jimmy's bed lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he that the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn.
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