cation suggested to willing imaginations by a pair of
wooden columns painted white. These columns, pine under the paint,
were bruised and chipped at the base; one of them showed a crack that
threatened to become a split; the "hard-wood" floor had become uneven;
and in a corner the walls apparently failed of solidity, where the
wall-paper had declined to accompany some staggerings of the plaster
beneath it.

The furniture was in great part an accumulation begun with the wedding
gifts; though some of it was older, two large patent rocking-chairs and
a footstool having belonged to Mrs. Adams's mother in the days of hard
brown plush and veneer. For decoration there were pictures and vases.
Mrs. Adams had always been fond of vases, she said, and every year
her husband's Christmas present to her was a vase of one sort or
another--whatever the clerk showed him, marked at about twelve or
fourteen dollars. The pictures were some of them etchings framed in
gilt: Rheims, Canterbury, schooners grouped against a wharf; and Alice
could remember how, in her childhood, her father sometimes pointed out
the watery reflections in this last as very fine. But it was a long time
since he had shown interest in such things--"or in anything much," as
she thought.

Other pictures were two water-colours in baroque frames; one being the
Amalfi monk on a pergola wall, while the second was a yard-wide display
of iris blossoms, painted by Alice herself at fourteen, as a birthday
gift to her mother. Alice's glance paused upon it now with no great
pride, but showed more approval of an enormous photograph of the
Colosseum. This she thought of as "the only good thing in the room";
it possessed and bestowed distinction, she felt; and she did not regret
having won her struggle to get it hung in its conspicuous place of
honour over the mantelpiece. Formerly that place had been held for
years by a steel-engraving, an accurate representation of the Suspension
Bridge at Niagara Falls. It was almost as large as its successor, the
"Colosseum," and it had been presented to Mr. Adams by colleagues in
his department at Lamb and Company's. Adams had shown some feeling when
Alice began to urge its removal to obscurity in the "upstairs hall"; he
even resisted for several days after she had the "Colosseum" charged
to him, framed in oak, and sent to the house. She cheered him up, of
course, when he gave way; and her heart never misgave her that there
might be a doubt