When I first saw her and some of her inmates it was on a
pleasant afternoon early in September, and I recall even now the simple
and quiet picture of the little back parlor where I sat down among them
as a new guest. I had been tranquilly greeted, and had slipped away into
a corner behind a table, whence I looked out with some curiosity on the
room and on the dwellers with whom my lot was to be cast for a long
while to come. I was a youth shy with the shyness of my age, but, having
had a share of rough, hardy life, ruddy of visage and full of that
intense desire to know things and people that springs up quickly in
those who have lived in country hamlets far from the stir and bustle of
city life.
The room I looked upon was strange, the people strange. On the floor was
India matting, red and white in little squares. A panel of painted white
wood-work ran around an octagonal chamber, into which stole silently the
evening twilight through open windows and across a long brick-walled
garden-space full of roses and Virginia creepers and odorless
wisterias. Between the windows sat a silent, somewhat stately female,
dressed in gray silk, with a plain frilled cap about the face, and with
long and rather slim arms tightly clad in silk. Her fingers played at
hide-and-seek among some marvelous lace stitches--evidently a woman
whose age had fallen heir to the deft ways of her youth. Over her
against the wall hung a portrait of a girl of twenty, somewhat sober in
dress, with what we should call a Martha Washington cap.
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