passion flower

Front matter

th fei

Hearty foster

BOOKS BY

Chapter I

“WE OUGHT to have a club and give three dances,” Jean Redding said hopefully.

“Oh, two, Jean,” Marian Richie protested instantly, from the floor.

The other girls—there were eight of them in the small, bright, pretty drawing room—laughed delightedly.

“Oh, Marian, you're terrible!” said Betty Small. “We talk of trying to get something started, and getting to know nice boys and—well, getting things started, and you act as if it was all setile “is | She was purposely being funny, and as she floundered the others all laughed again.

“No, but listen, if we could give a dance——?” Jean pleaded.

‘They were at her house; she had just been hostess at a luncheon party with bridge to follow; one table had played plain bridge, and the other had experimented hilariously with contract. Then Jean’s mother and sister had come in with tea and sandwiches, and it was now nearly six o’clock. The food was demolished, and the pale creamy dregs of tea were cooling in the scattered cups; everybody had to be going at once.

But at the last minute someone had said what fun this was, and what a wonderful idea Jean had had in getting them all together, and someone else had asked why they could not do it again soon. They had all been such friends a few years ago in “high,” and it seemed such a shame never to see each other!

“My dear, the months go by, and they are years, and we're all getting simply aged!’ Edith Whitman, who was feminine and fluttery and who played the violin, exclaimed plaintively and impressively, and they all laughed again.

“Well, I’m twenty-three!” Betty affirmed boldly.

“T know. Isn’t it awful!” Marian echoed.

Catherine Pringle looked from one girl to the other quickly, sympathetically, with glowing, serious blue eyes that were black under her black, broad-brimmed hat, but she did not speak. She u was the stranger in this group; Jean’s asking her at all had been a surprise to both herself and Jean. They had known each other at school, of course, but they had hardly spoken since. Sometimes, shopping at Christmas time, they met down town in San Francisco, at the Emporium or the White House, and stood laughing and chatting for a few minutes. But there was no friendship between their families.

Jean had told her mother and sister that she was going to ask the Pringle girl; she didn’t have to come if she didn’t want to! And Mrs. Redding had ventured timidly that she thought that would be nice. There had been quite a flutter at the Redding house when Cassy’s note of acceptance had come. She was quite the most important person there; they were all conscious of her.

“No, but listen,” Jean now persisted, feeling happy and sociable because her party had been such a success, and filled with an unwonted courage. “Listen, we know we're not in society, and we don’t care a snap!”

There was gay laughter.

“Righto!”? agreed Margaret Paine, who worked in a library.

“No, but of course we’re not,” Jean repeated with an appealing look. They all furtively or openly glanced at Cassy to see what her reaction to this was, but Cassy’s face was a polite blank. She was in society—in a way, Jean thought nervously.

“T mean, we didn’t have coming-out parties at the St. Francis,’ Jean pursued, “and we don’t belong to the Burlingame crowd. But why shouldn’t we have dances at the Fairmont?”

“We'd probably have a lot more fun than they do!” Marian said of the society débutantes, and everyone agreed with her. Cassy alone said nothing but continued to regard the company with her strangely glowing blue-black eyes.

“Would they cost a horrible lot, Jean?” Margaret asked rather timidly, to the secret relief of more than one of the others.

“I don’t know. We could find out!”

Cassy thought of her home—Papa, her mother, her sister Gertrude...

They were all talking of hotels, orchestras, eligible men;

Marian had out a neat little notebook and was jotting down suggestions. Someone suggested a name: the Juanita Club—the Western Girls

“Or we could have the dances at our houses,” Betty Small began doubtfully. They looked at the Reddings’ parlor, a very nice room, quite wide, with a columned arch going into the dining room, and a fireplace with little white porches at a dozen heights, and strips of mirror.

Again Cassy thought of her house, and she knew they all did. You could have any number of dances, easily, in the Pringle house. She began to feel horribly uncomfortable.

It was a relief when the group scattered. She walked away from Jean’s doorway and all its little brass mail boxes quickly, talking to Margaret Paine, of the library, a nice, serious girl. Cassy, in her innocence, made the mistake of supposing that Margaret’s father was dead.

“Oh, no, Dad’s alive, he’s the livest of us all!” Margaret said, with a laugh at some thought suggested by his name. ‘“‘He’s lots of fun,” she added. ““Why? What made you think he was dead ?”

“Oh, nothing,” Cassy said hastily. But it had been because it seemed odd that a girl with a living father should work.

She could not but feel superior to Margaret Paine, although Margaret seemed happy enough about it, when Margaret turned into a shabby cottage yard in San José Avenue. The winter evening was dark and cool now, and there were lights in all the houses; shops were gushing light, it was Saturday night. It was not so dark but what Cassy could see that the cottage was of the common pattern: bay window, flowers, and chinks of glowing red in a strip beneath the dining room shades, yellow brilliance from the kitchen window.

“T guess my brother’s in the dining room doing his home work,” said Margaret, quite unashamed.

Left alone, Cassy walked on, not too fast, for she was in no hurry to get home. Her heart always experienced a chill, a certain shrinking, when she turned at her own corner. She hated to leave the friendly, busy, lighted world of Saturday night and enter the darkness and silence of the Guerrero Street house. Mission Street was flashing with radiance, movies, restaurants, drug stores, all going full blast. Cassy turned her back upon it and began to think about her father and Mamma and Gertrude.

The Pringle house stood three stories high, lifted upon a dark old bulkhead and looming close over the sidewalk like a menace. It had been built far back in its own park fifty years before, but the topography of San Francisco’s streets had changed since then.

Now it looked crowded, awkward, and grotesque, a great unbalanced bulk in the night. The downstairs rooms were all dark, viewed from the street, but the fanlight over the hall doorway showed a strange, dull, sanguine color, and upstairs there was a bright light in the bathroom, and a dull one in the big bedroom in front.

Cassy mounted old wooden steps, between bulging bulkheads dimly draped with vines, and walked around the house on a brick path that had buckled itself into dangerous humps and hollows. In the winter dark she smelled decaying leaves; a palm tree, high above her head in the blackness, clashed its spears drearily.

She felt her way to the side entrance and stepped into a close, cold hall smelling of apples, dust, decaying wood. A dim light in a red glass globe evenly blistered burned against a stained side wall. The hallway was narrow and arched; it gave upon a larger hall from which the dining room and library and parlors opened. ‘Through the wide doorway into the dining room, Cassy could see Keno setting the table. She was ballooning the cloth, it sank limp and crooked, and Keno ballooned it again, and again it sank all to one side. i

Cassy saw no more; she went on through the front hall and mounted the stairs. They were not wide stairs, but they had a pretentious curve and sweep; they were carpeted in red with old brass rods ; they rose steeply and disappeared into darkness above. ‘The ceilings in the Pringle house were very high, which gave the rooms a narrow-shouldered feeling.

Familiar smells. Dusty, carpety, cold foody smells, and presently the penetrating thread of carbolic through them all.

A man of sixty came out into the upper hall and raised his hand to turn up the gas bead over his head. Cassy was startled; her father did not usually come home until late on Saturday afternoons. He went to the club on Saturdays and played dominoes.

“What’s all this mean?” he said coldly.

“T don’t understand,” Cassy countered innocently.

“This staggering in at this hour?” her father demanded.

“Staggering!” she said proudly, quickly.

“W ell—well ” he said nervously and impatiently.

She knew he was neither angry nor interested ; just cross.

“I was playing bridge at Jean Redding’s, Papa.” Her tone grew sympathetic. “No dominoes?” she asked.

“No,” he answered briefly. ‘“‘And do girls play cards until after six in these days and then walk the streets alone?” he asked. But his tone was a shade mollified, and Cassy, who knew every gradation of it, took heart. ““Your mother and I were anxious about you,” he said severely.

“I’m sorry,” she said blithely, readily. She could say it as easily as draw her breath and mean as little by it.

“Cassy: ” began her father impressively, and paused.

“Sir rah

“Folker has gone.”

“Folker?”’? She was surprised. She turned—a tall, glowing brown girl in a handsome coat with a beaver collar, and a widebrimmed black hat—and looked at him interestedly.

“He was imp’dent to Papa,” Mrs. Pringle, small, faded, infinitely tired, timid, and drab, came out into the hall to contribute meekly.

“Folker was?” Leroy Pringle asked roundly, in his full, pompous voice. Cassy saw that her unfortunate mother was trapped again and gave her father a scornful look. Mrs. Pringle trembled and fluttered.

“Why—why, didn’t you say so, Papa?” she faltered.

“No, I said nothing of the kind!” the man answered flatly and firmly. He looked over his glasses patiently. “I wanted to speak to Cassy,” he suggested politely.

“Oh, go right ahead, Papa! I thought you’d finished.”

“No, I hadn’t finished,” Leroy Pringle said, and sighed. He turned toward the stairs. “It’s of no consequence!” he said indifferently.

“Please, Papa A

Cassy remained in the hall only long enough to see the majestically descending head go down into the great vacuum of the stairway; then she looked at her mother, shrugged, smiled sardonically, and crossed the hall to her own room. Mrs. Pringle trailed forlornly after her.

“I thought he was in a real good mood this morning, but I guess something went wrong at the club!” she said in a whisper, following the girl in.

Cassy took off her handsome beaver-collared coat and hung it in an old-fashioned wardrobe filled with other handsome garments: a blue suit, a brown suit, silk blouses, a white coat, a plaid raincoat. She put her hat on the shelf above and stepped out of her shoes.

“You ought to take that dress off, Cassy.”

“T’m going to.”

“Tt seems real chilly to-night,” the older woman, who had a crocheted shawl about her shoulders and was huddling her feeble little claws in the wool, offered uncertainly.

“This house is an ice box,” Cassy pronounced firmly.

“TI think he has the furnace lighted, too,” Mrs. Pringle murmured apologetically, glancing toward a small black iron grille in a corner of the floor.

“T doubt it!’ Cassy said darkly. j

“Seemed to me I’ve been smelling furnace gas all day,” the other asserted mildly. “Was it a nice party, dearie?” she asked.

“Tt was lovely.”

“How many girls were there, Cassy ?”

“Eight—two tables of bridge. The old high-school crowd. *Member Edith Whitman? There was a nice new one there— Margaret Paine.”

“The San Mateo Paines?” Mrs. Pringle asked, interested.

“Oh, my, no! She works in the library. They live round here on San José Avenue, in one of those cottages near the school.”

“She knew who you were?”

“T don’t know.” :

“T guess she did,” Mrs. Pringle said, in satisfaction. “Everyone out here knows our house.”

She herself had been proud of it for the twenty-five years of her married life. She imagined that all San Francisco was proud of it.

“Was there a dress there cost what yours did ?”

“No, I don’t think there was. They were all taking it in.”

“T guess they were,” said Mrs. Pringle.

Cassy was in a worn old blue jersey now; she turned around at her bureau and looked at her mother under a bushy cloud of soft brushed hair that was lustrous, silky, coal black.

“T was the only one that wasn’t bobbed,” she observed dryly.

“T s’pose so. But you know how your father feels, dear.”

“T ought to!’ Cassy agreed, with a brief mirthless laugh.

“She’s terribly pretty—she’s prettier than I ever was,” her mother thought, in a sort of astonishment. The girl’s skin was a clear, almost transparent brown, and stained with scarlet on the cheek-bones ; her big eyes flashed with liquid fire. Her lashes curled back with spectacular length and curve; she had the astonished aspect of asmall child when she opened her eyes wide. When she tossed the cloud of silky hair backward and it fell in gypsy ringlets on her shoulders she looked foreign to her mother. Often, without knowing it, Cassy made her mother uneasy.

“T’m glad to have you go round with girls of your own age and have a good time,” Mrs. Pringle said.

Cassy laughed shortly.

“Mamma, when you were young, did you ever go to dances?”

“No, I never went out much, Cassy. My folks didn’t approve of it. And then I was only twenty-two when your father married me.”

“T’ll be twenty-two next month,” Cassy murmured, struck.

“How'd you meet Papa?” she presently asked idly, as she massed and pinned the silky tumble of curls into place. She knew, vaguely.

“He came to consult my father—your grandfather was a doctor, you know. It was after Gert’s mother had died; poor Papa, I remember how dark and sad he looked—left with little Gertrude.””

Cassy, eyeing her mother in the mirror, felt an inward shudder. Papa always looked dark and sad. How any simple girl of twenty-two could ever have been drawn to Papa puzzled her.

“He was forty, Mamma?”

“Forty-one.” Mrs. Pringle sighed for no obvious reason and with idle fingers pleated the ends of the frill that hung at her thin little neck. She still clung to the high ruched collars and lengthy skirts of the past generation.

She and Cassy went downstairs together, and the gloom, heaviness and dullness of the old mansion enveloped the girl like a tangible cloud. The wall papers were all old and dark and stained: they had been expensive once; they were rich in chocolate and gold and blood-red designs.

The floors were heavily carpeted to the very baseboards, where the thick folds were filled with dust, and the heads of the tacks showed. At the windows—there were seven great bay windows on the ground floor alone—draped fringed curtains of dark red or dark green rep were gathered back into deep folds by wide bands of braid and heavy tassels. The under curtains, of Nottingham lace, were also draped back, to show mouldy vistas of the garden evergreens, laurel and firs, shabby eucalyptus and bushy thick flowering plants, and the paths that were filmed with dank moss.

The Pringles used the old library, across the hall from the long stretch of the double parlors, as a sitting room. It was a square, uncompromising apartment, with an arohed marble fireplace breaking the lines of the glass-doored bookcases. In the fireplace was a coal grate of a half-oval of steel bars, and from the mantel still depended a scalloped and embroidered cover of deep magenta flannel. There was a clock representing Don Quixote and Sancho on the mantel, a bronze windmill rising between the two doughty little bronze riders. And on either side of the clock was a large Sevres vase. One of the pair had been broken into a hundred pieces and was mended beautifully.

Leroy Pringle sat to-night, and always sat, in a certain comfortable plush armchair with fat, stuffed, fringed, and buttoned arms, and an embroidered tidy at the back. Beside him, on the long library table, a gas lamp with a Welsbach burner was lighted ; he often said that he preferred this light to any in the world. Above the table two lights in a gasolier of four were lighted. They burned white, in round, smooth globes.

Gertrude, her father’s daughter by an earlier marriage, was with him now, when Cassy and Mrs. Pringle came in. Gertrude was reading the second half of the evening paper under the somewhat diffused light across the table, while Mr. Pringle read the first half beneath the concentrated brilliance of the lamp. Neither stirred nor looked up at the entrance of the two women.

“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Pringle murmured, under her breath. She went to the fire, which was chewing sulkily on black coals, and began to stir it ineffectually. Cassy doubled her slimness and suppleness into a patent rocker that moved on a stationary base, and resting an elbow upon its upholstered arm and her glowing gypsy cheek upon a brown hand, stared vaguely into space.

“For pity’s sakes!’ Gertrude said suddenly. “I wonder if this Watson is any relation to the Napa Watsons!”

Her father looked off his paper tolerantly, and Mrs. Pringle turned from the fireplace in interest. But after a little talk, to which Cassy did not listen, they decided that the forger of the newspaper story could have had nothing to do with the Napa family, who were really nice people, if plain.

“You're a great one to get news out of the paper, Gertie,” Mrs. Pringle said.

“Well, when you know everybody in a town, and all about them, and see right through their little pretensions . . .” Gertrude murmured, reading. “How was your party, Cassy?” she asked, after a moment.

“Oh, it was fine. We had lots of fun.”

“Many there?”

“Only about eight.”

“Oh, I thought it was going to be quite a party?”

“Well, it was. That is, when I met Jean, that day, and we first arranged it, she wanted an evening party,” Cassy explained. “But then Papa wouldn’t consider that, so I telephoned, and she said that we could have a little afternoon party instead.”

“Exactly!” said her father, in obscure satisfaction. The women had no idea what he meant by it, but it was not the custom to question Papa. Cassy said to her sister in a low tone, ““What happened to Folker?”

“T don’t know,” Gertrude returned with equal caution as she took off her rimless glasses and snapped them into place on her breast with a spring. “I imagine——” she was beginning with raised eyebrows, when Mr. Pringle said quickly:

“Here, here, here, no talking, please. I can’t stand that whispering when I’m trying to read!”

Both girls fell silent, and Gertrude drew her glasses out on their black silk cord and turned to her paper again. Gertrude was thirty-five, a thin, intellectual-looking girl in a shiny, dark blue silk dress embroidered with a red, purple, yellow, and green Grecian pattern. Her stockings and slippers were impeccable, and her thin, well-brushed dark hair swept plainly off her face. Gertrude had the air of a person who is honest and frank with life; she spoke like a thinker, moderately but firmly. She read a great deal, thought out her costumes carefully, sometimes taking a week of shopping to a single gown, and lunched and went to lectures and concerts with women friends. Gertrude spoke French rather well and had been abroad for a year. Her real interest in life, however, was the Pringle genealogy; she regarded the family as the most important in the world.

Cassy had heard her say things that put the richest, the most distinguished of American families into second place; she had

PASSION FLOWER II often heard Gertrude’s statement that the King and Queen of England had much less English blood in their veins than the Pringles had. Gertrude’s mother had been a Vanderstart, which was almost as good as being a Pringle. Cassy was deeply impressed by the thought of her own lineage and of Gertie’s even superior descent.

“Folker,” said their father suddenly, dropping the hand that held his newspaper to the floor beside him, ‘‘Folker has been troublesome for some time.”

The women came readily to attention, and Cassy murmured, “Yes, I know.”

“You may have had some idea of it, Cassy,” her father said unencouragingly, “but I cannot for the life of me see how you could have known it!”

Nobody paying any attention to this rebuke, he presently added, “T told him last week that I could not tolerate his attitude any longer, and this morning I let him go.”

As he paused, Gertrude said intelligently:

“T think you were quite right.”

“And shall you get another chauffeur, Papa?” Cassy asked interestedly.

He looked at her with discontent. The girl was all over the place, her eager voice like a blast, her hair ruffled over her ears, her long legs gathered up under her in anything but a dignified manner. Over his glasses Leroy Pringle regarded his youngest born with half-veiled eyes.

“Oh, no,” he said dryly. “I shall drive myself about, of course, especially when I am in full dress, attending the theatre or a dinner. That run to Napa will be nothing for me with my bad wrist.”

Cassy emitted a disrespectful giggle and subsided.

“T have—hem!” her father pursued, glancing at his paper again and clearing his throat. “I have already engaged another man. He drove me home to-night. He seems to be perfectly satisfactory.”

“He looks real young,” Mrs. Pringle offered timidly.

“Where did you see him, Lottie?”

“T was at the door when you came in, Papa, and I looked down at the drive.”

“And you saw enough to make you decide that the man was too young? Ha!” said Leroy Pringle, with relish, “that’s the woman of it, that’s characteristic. Well,” he added genially, stretching his legs, smiling at his womenkind, “‘let’s hope that to-morrow Mamma doesn’t object to the way his hair is curled, or because his coloring doesn’t match the upholstery of the car!”

They all laughed perfunctorily as Hiota appeared neatly in the doorway to announce dinner.

Dinner. Four enormous chairs at an enormous oblong table, four lighted candles, a concession to Gertrude years ago, and two dim beads of gas above, a concession to Papa. Windows draped in dark rep, and a heavily embossed wall paper divided into panels. A wainscoting of Lincruster-Walton in dark brown, an oak sideboard with a display of silver pitchers and cake plates upon it.

Two china cabinets were in the room, each crowded to bursting with plates and glass. Gertrude’s chocolate set, with tall gilded cups, and the Royal Worcester—sugar bowls, tureen, gravy-boats in oval saucers, curved fish-bone plates.

Hiota and Keno served the dinner. Little Japanese Keno, looking insignificant and flat-breasted in her American maid’s uniform, was Hiota’s wife. hey brought the soup, the pale slices of bread, the cool roast and the roasted potatoes, the stewed tomatoes, the cold green artichokes rocking on their bases, the pumpkin pie.

“Are you going out to-night, Gertie?”

The silence was split, and rolled back into the dark corners of the room. Echoes drifted about; Cassy suppressed a rending yawn, and stirred uneasily in her chair.

“Olive is to telephone,” Gertrude said briefly and lightly, like one alluding to a secret.

“The girls,” began Cassy, her voice sounding loud and young,

“were talking to-day about having one or two little cotillions this winter.”

“What girls?” her father asked instantly, dropping his head to look over his glasses in her direction.

“The girls at the card party, Papa.”

“T see,” he said discontentedly.

“They thought that if they could put up—well, say ten doljars apiece—they’re going to find out what it would cost Ye

“It sounds to me as if you got that expression, ‘put up,’ from one of them!” Gertrude suggested good-naturedly. “It doesn’t sound like one of us.”

“T know. I wasn’t thinking.”

“I don’t want you to have anything to do with it. I don’t care what they do!—No, no more,” said Leroy Pringle quietly, waving away the second passing of pie.

“Oh, Papa, why not?”

“Why, you don’t mean to say you want to, Cassy ?” Gertrude demanded, amused. Mrs. Pringle had the air of one who wishes to make herself invisible, one who is seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking nothing.

“Well, yes, I do!” Cassy said defensively.

“No, no, no,” her father said, not unkindly. He would not have to use any violence here; the thing was trivial. “You don’t want to get into that sort of thing, Cassy. You’d regret it all your life!”

“Girls like that only want to get a hold on you, Cassy,” her sister said warningly. ‘““That’s all they want. They want the entrée to this house, they want to tell everyone how well they know Cassy Pringle!”

“They’re not your sort,” said her father. “I didn’t like this card-party invitation in the first place,”’ he went on. ““You remember that I said that I thought this little Miss Redding had considerable assurance to propose it. I knew exactly what it would lead to.”

“T)on’t they live in those new apartments in the Du Barry?” Gertrude asked.

“Yes, up by the hospital on the hill.”

“Well, exactly!” Gertrude responded triumphantly. “You can imagine what it would mean to a girl like that to get in here.”

Cassy was impressed. She said, in a complaining undertone, “Well, I only thought it would be fun!” and thought no more about it.

After dinner, when Gertrude went off with Olive Shaw to a lecture about Women’s Place under the Roman Empire, Cassy drifted about the library awhile, studying the familiar backs of the books: Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Gibbon, Hume, Victor Hugo, and E. P. Roe, lines and lines and lines of moldy old volumes whose badly printed pages stuck together in thick wedges, when once in a dozen years some exploring hand opened them.

“You'll have to stop fidgeting, Cassy,” said her father.

“Papa, would you mind if I walked down to the library to get a book?”

“Have Folker—hem!—have Wallace take you,” her father amended.

“Oh, is his name Wallace?”

“Wallace, yes. Daniel Wallace.”

“Nice name,” Cassy observed.

“Tf your mother has no objection I don’t mind your going down to the library,” her father said.

“Tt’s only a few blocks, Papa, and I’d really like the walk.”

She was thinking of the brightness of Valencia Street and Mission Street, the candy stores crowded, the movies gushing streams of living human beings. More than once on decorous errands in the late afternoon or evening she had even slipped into a movie for a few intoxicating stolen minutes.

“T will not have you on the streets alone at night, Cassy. Ring that bell twice,” directed her father.

Wallace appeared. He was not a particularly tall young man, but lithe and strong and squarely built. With his olive-green cap in his hand, his gaze respectfully fixed upon his employer, the chauffeur received his directions, took Cassy to the library, and waited for her there. They did not speak coming or going, except when Cassy said, ‘““Thank you, Wallace,” and Wallace cleared his throat and said, “Good-night, Miss Pringle.”

She returned to the dark, smelly, impressive house feeling vaguely elated, her two new library books under her arm. Her father was still in the library, reading; a dull glow came out from the open door into the enormous vault of the hall, where the gas jet still burned with a rasping whine. Mrs. Pringle never had a chance to look at the paper until late in the evening; she was reading it now, her heavy eyes half closing as she glanced from menus to fashions, from stock quotations to social notes.

Sometimes she made a comment.

“Where does Hickson Gray get all his money, Papa? I see he’s interested in the new bank.”

“They owned most of that remade land over Richmond way.”

“That so?”

And then after a long silence, during which the woman sat dreaming:

“His folks kept a roadhouse down the Penins’la, didn’t they?”

“Certainly they did. That family doesn’t amount to much!” Leroy Pringle would say.

Cassy knew just how it went; it was always the same. To-night she went noiselessly past the open door and ascended the stairway to her own room.

Seeing it as a part of the Pringle magnificence, she had always loved this room. In the same spirit, her father had approved of her interest in it, and there had- been no lack of money with which to make it attractive when Cassy had graduated. The walls were papered in silver and pink stripes embellished with ribbons and roses, and the bay window was bare except for fresh ruffled chintz. The same chintz covered Cassy’s enormous old-fashioned walnut bed, with its straight high back and millwork scrolls; there was a chintz flounce on her dressing table.

Other modern touches were the long-legged doll among the cushions on the bed, and the shelves filled with modern books; Shakespeare and Ibsen in slim leather, and red novels with gilded titles. Also Cassy had a pretty cherry desk, with a green vase full of shot, and a long green quill, a crystal and brass inkwell, and a sealing outfit with a tiny candlestick and tapers.