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 corner, between the
door and the window, there was a rosewood bookcase, with the bare
shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above it hung
an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in a pond.
Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion picture
represented the same group of children scattering crumbs before a polite
brood of chickens in a barnyard. Between the windows a third engraving
immortalized the "Burial of Latané" in the presence of several sad and
resigned ladies in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was
presided over by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr,
wearing a white scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand.
This portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr's grandfather, the
Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were the
solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny Berkeley
was "not brought up to do anything."

To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in her