“Such alterations!” she wrote. “The house as brown as my hands, and a
picter in it that cost two thousan’ dollars, the awfullest daub, I
reckon, that ever was got up. Why, I had rather a hundred times have
that picter in my room of Putnam goin’ in after the wolf; that means
somethin’, and this one don’t. But the rooms for the bride, they are
just like a show-house, I’m sure, with their painted walls and _frisky_
work, I b’lieve, they call it, and the _lam-kins_ at the winders, fifty
dollars a winder, as I’m a livin’ woman, and a naked boy in one of ’em
holdin’ a pot of flowers on his head; and then her _boode’r_ or anything
under heavens you are a mind to call that little room at the end of the
upper south hall, and which opens out of her sleepin’ room. There’s a
glass as long as she is set in a recess like, and in the door opposite
is a lookin’-glass, and in the door on t’other side,—three
lookin’-glasses in all, so that you can see yourself before and behind
and beside, and silk ottermans, and divans and marble shelves and
drawers, and a chair for her to sit in and be dressed, and she’s got a
French waitin’-maid, right from Paris, they say, and some of her
underclothes cost a hundred dollars apiece, think of that, when three
yards of factory would make plenty good enough and last enough sight
longer. I’m glad I don’t have to iron ’em; they’ve got a flutin’-iron
they paid thirty dollars for, and Miss Franklin’s bed, that is to be, is
hung with silk curtains. I should s’pose she’d want a breath of air; the
dear knows I should; and one of the rooms they’ve turned into a picter
gallery, and the likenesses of the _Burleighs_ is there now, ‘cause Mrs.
Franklin must have ’em to look at. There’s her granny, a decent-lookin’
woman enough, with powdered hair, and her husband took when he was
younger, and her mother in her weddin’ close, exactly the fashion, I
remember, and her father and herself when she was younger by a good many
years than she is now, for them as has seen her says she’s thirty if
she’s a day, and Frank ain’t quite twenty-eight.”