CHAPTER III.
"It is the only set of the kind I ever met with in which you are neither led nor driven, but actually fall, and that imperceptibly into literary topics; and I attribute it to this, that in that house literature is not a treat for company upon invitation days, but is actually the daily bread of the family."-- Written of Maria Edgeworth's home.
Pamela Reston stood in Bella Bathgate's parlour and surveyed it disconsolately.
It was papered in a trying shade of terra-cotta and the walls were embellished by enlarged photographs of the Bathgate family--decent, well-living people, but plain-headed to a degree.

Linoleum covered the floor.

A round table with a red-and-green cloth occupied the middle of the room, and two arm-chairs and six small chairs stood about stiffly like sentinels.

Pamela had tried them all and found each one more unyielding than the next.

The mantelshelf, painted to look like some uncommon kind of marble, supported two tall glass jars bright blue and adorned with white raised flowers, which contained bunches of dried grasses ("silver shekels" Miss Bathgate called them), rather dusty and tired-looking.