After all, if Oliver had always been ushered into the drawing-room which these closed books were supposed to embellish, he would not have found many traces of higher aspirations in its gaudy carpet, and chairs and tables of one ponderous monotonous style, since Mrs. Polley’s influence had at least saved them from being slim and gimcrack, with its samples of meretricious fancy-work, in which there was as little fancy as there was use, than he could discover in the back parlour. The family room was furnished with the darkest drugget and coarsest mahogany and hair cloth. It did not, according to the Polleys’ ideas, admit of any attempt at ornament. It was reserved to fulfil their notions of ease and comfort, the table being often covered and littered with the materials employed in the girls’ home dressmaking, and the chimney-piece given over to Mr. Polley’s tobacco-pouch and pipes, and Mrs. Polley’s thimble and reels of cotton. ’Mily Polley was not a bad mimic in that lowest development of art which is contented to grasp and caricature such salient details and absurdities of human nature as come within the artist’s limited observation. And though there was a horrible absence of reverence and tenderness in the girl’s rendering of some old woman’s palsied utterance, or some half-imbecile boy’s stutter, in her cool giving of her own father’s stock phrases, even in her close copies of Mr. Holland—the Polleys’ clergyman’s—stiff or strained gestures in the most solemn part of his services, the representation was the only version of the drama which ever reached the Polleys, while it was as good as a play in forcing Mrs. Polley to relax into a grim smile and to forget for a moment her rare achievements, and in stimulating Mr. Polley to clap his hands magnanimously at the mocking echo of himself. There was no theatre in Friarton, and if there had been, the Polleys belonged to a branch of the Christian Church which condemns theatres without reservation, nay, sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Polley, extends the condemnation to play-books as well as players.