The
walls of their rooms were covered with family portraits of the colonial
period, and Mrs. Carr, who had parted with most of her treasures, often
wondered how they had preserved so many proofs of a distinguished
descent. Even her silver had gone--first the quaint old service with the
Bolton crest, which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the
forks and spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was
carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She was
a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women
give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit
her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the furniture with which she
lived, to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother.
When one after one these things went from her, she felt as if the very
roots of her being were torn up from the warm familiar earth in which
they had grown. "There's nothing left in the parlour that I shouldn't be
ashamed to have your grandmother look at," she had once confessed to her
daughters.

Seen by the light of history, this parlour, in which so much of
Gabriella's childhood was spent, was not without interest as an archaic
survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian mind. The walls
were covered with bottle-green paper on which endless processions of
dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly toward an embossed
border--the result of an artistic frenzy of the early 'eighties. Neither
Mrs. Carr nor Jimmy Wrenn, who paid the rent, had chosen this paper, but
having been left on the dealer's hands, it had come under the eye of the
landlord, who, since he did not have to live with it had secured it at a
bargain. Too unused to remonstrance to make it effective, Mrs. Carr had
suffered the offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having a
taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as "handsome."
From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt chandelier, elaborately
festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when it was lighted, a dim and
troubled gloom down on the threadbare Axminster carpet. Above the white
marble mantelpiece, the old French mirror, one of the few good things
left over from a public sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a
pair of bronze candelabra with crystal pendants, and a mahogany clock,
which had kept excellent time for half a century and then had stopped
suddenly one day while Marthy was cleaning. In the