Behind the davenport was a mahogany refectory table bearing a top-heavy gold pagoda of a lamp. On one side was placed a limp leather volume of Whittier’s Snowbound, and on the other a silver framed photograph of the wedding party, with Minelda’s diaper showing. The “changeable” wallpaper of purple into rose permitted but two works of art to “mark up” its distinction, one of these a small violently colored view of a rose-covered cottage doorway, the other a large gold-framed copy of a shallow brown brook with a deer peeping through brown willow branches beside it. Culture was modestly represented by an old golden oak bookcase reclaimed from the Friends’ attic and properly hidden behind two potted palms. The old books were there as they had been in Mama’s day, but to save wear and tear they were locked up. Florrie’s big doll was locked in here so she wouldn’t break it, and also her sisters’ gilt-edged diaries, because Mrs. Willard was a careful woman and felt that all possessions were better locked up, since it was regrettably impossible to lock up their owners.

“I want to teach the girls to take care of things,” she told Papa. “They’ve lived such a helter-skelter life, they’ve got to learn how nice people act. Supposing some of my relations, like Cousin Jay from Ashtabula, would come to visit us. Why, he’d think they were little hoodlums.”

“That’s the ticket,” Papa agreed, with satisfaction. “I want you to make ladies of ’em. God knows, I can’t do it, because it takes a lady to make ’em act right. That’s what their own mother would want.”

The girls were in a daze over their sudden ascent in the world. Imagine living in the big Furness house, with a piano and pictures and balconies and thick rugs. Every day there was some new luxury added to the household. Mrs. Willard considered it stylish to subscribe to a magazine of some sort, and, after discussing the matter for several evenings with her husband and callers, settled on the Delineator. A magazine rack was immediately purchased for this, and to keep it company the Lesterville Weekly Courier and the London Junction Furniture Company catalog. The girls were not allowed to touch this collection, however, because they would muss up everything. At first they were too awed by their new splendor to resent the rules for its protection. At school they boasted of their new mother and their new house, the dumbwaiter, the big empty stables, the fountain that didn’t work, the iron dog. Lena, always more courageous than her sisters, even planned and issued invitations to her classmates and teachers to a big party (with favors and games and prizes like Myrtle Chase’s parties), date to be determined later. It was just as well that she had a fight with Mary Evelyn over the invitation list, because it gave an excuse for calling the whole thing off with no loss of dignity. Their new mother, they announced, was richer than anybody in London Junction; she had a whole cedar chest full of Philippine embroidered underwear; she owned a cottage at Silver Lake where undoubtedly they would henceforth spend their summers lolling in rowboats and collecting shells; she had a fabulous brother Vance who spent a year or two in military school, and had been to New York City, and she had relatives of great consequence in the East, in addition to her cousin, the Ashtabula congressman. Papa overheard these vulgar boasts and reprimanded the girls severely, though he himself was making important references to these advantages at his lodge and around the Store.