The
room was very simple, for she loved the well-polished black-walnut
furniture among which she had lived all her married life, and nothing
would have induced her to change it for new, however beautiful.
The walls were adorned with religious prints, but on the space over the
dressing-table, with its array of ebony and silver hair-brushes, was a
group of old, faded photographs, evidently all of the same
person--Joyselle; and over the chimney-piece hung four large oval
photographs, in varnished black frames, picked out with narrow red
stripes; quite evidently four middle-aged peasants in their best attire.
Near the door a coloured crayon of Theo at the age of five, in plaid
trousers, a short jacket, and a wide collar of crochetted lace, smiled
sheepishly down at the world. There was a table covered with books of
the kind whose gilt edges invariably stick together, because they are
never opened, and on the little table on the left of the broad bed, with
its scarlet counterpane and huge, soft-looking pillows, were an old
black crucifix and two shabby prayer-books.
It was a plain, inartistic room, and the middle-aged woman whose holy
of holies it had been for fifteen years was as old-fashioned and
unbeautiful as it; yet there was, somehow, about the place a certain
atmosphere of goodness and peace that cannot be described in words.
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