She would note with a sort of apologetic affection the details of this familiar room that she had early learned to stigmatize as old-fashioned, and in her schoolgirl phrase “tacky”--the chintz curtains with their big flowers; the hair-cloth covered rocking chairs; the four-poster mahogany bedstead with its heavily corniced tester, the red cloth goffered to the center to focus in a big gilt star; the mahogany bureau, so tall that the mirror made good headway to the ceiling; the floriated Brussels carpet so antique of pattern that she used to say she believed it was manufactured before the flood and so staunch of web that it was destined to last till doomsday; the little work-table, with its drawers still filled with spools, and buttons, and reels of embroidery silk, and balls of wool for knitting and crochet--doubtless some piece of her grandmother’s beautiful handiwork still lay where her busy fingers had placed it, with the needle yet in the stitch. The rose curtained window gave on no smiling scene--it was one of the few outlooks from the house that was not of bosky presentment. But the grove had ceased ere these precincts were reached and the view was of a dull bit of pasture and beyond a dreary stretch of cornfields, in which the stalks still stood, stripped of the ears, pallid with frost and writhen into fantastic postures by wind and weather. It was but a dreary landscape, trembling under slanting lines of rain, and later of sleet, for the halcyon weather had vanished at last, and winter had come in earnest. A mist hung much of the time between the earth and a leaden sky, and the woods that lay along the low horizon were barely glimpsed as a dull, indistinct smudge.