But when a girl, with all the feelings which belong to her at that
hour, seeks this pure audience and sends upward the name of a man
on her spotless prayers, he is already a sacred happiness to her as
well as a care.

On this day she was radiant with tender happiness. The snow of
itself was exhilarating. It spread around her an enchanted land. It
buried out of sight in the yard and stable lots all mire, all ugly
things. This ennoblement of eternal objects reacted with comic
effect on the interior of the house itself; outside it was a marble
palace, surrounded by statuary; within--alas! It provoked her
humor, that innocent fun-making which many a time had rendered her
environment the more tolerable.

When she went down into the parlor early that evening to await
David's coming, this gayety, this laughter of the generations of
men and women who made up her past, possessed her still. She made a
fresh investigation of the parlor, took a new estimate of its
peculiar furnishings. The hearthstones--lead color. The mohair
furniture--cold at all temperatures of the room and slippery in
every position of the body. The little marble-top table on which
rested a glass case holding a stuffed blue jay clutching a
varnished limb: tail and eyes stretched beyond the reach of
muscles. Near the door an enormous shell which, on summer days, the
cook blew as a dinner horn for the hands in the field. A collection
of ambrotypes which, no matter how held, always caused the sitter
to look as though the sun was shining in his eyes. The violence of
the Brussels carpet. But the cheap family portraits in thin wooden
frames--these were Gabriella's delight in a mood like this.