The furniture was in great part an accumulation begun with the
wedding gifts; though some of it was older, two large patent
rocking-chairs and a footstool having belonged to Mrs. Adams's
mother in the days of hard brown plush and veneer. For
decoration there were pictures and vases. Mrs. Adams had
always been fond of vases, she said, and every year her
husband's Christmas present to her was a vase of one sort or
another--whatever the clerk showed him, marked at about twelve or
fourteen dollars. The pictures were some of them etchings framed
in gilt: Rheims, Canterbury, schooners grouped against a wharf;
and Alice could remember how, in her childhood, her father
sometimes pointed out the watery reflections in this last as very
fine. But it was a long time since he had shown interest in such
things--"or in anything much," as she thought.

Other pictures were two water-colours in baroque frames; one
being the Amalfi monk on a pergola wall, while the second was a
yard-wide display of iris blossoms, painted by Alice herself at
fourteen, as a birthday gift to her mother. Alice's glance
paused upon it now with no great pride, but showed more approval
of an enormous photograph of the Colosseum. This she thought of
as "the only good thing in the room"; it possessed and bestowed
distinction, she felt; and she did not regret having won her
struggle to get it hung in its conspicuous place of honour over
the mantelpiece. Formerly that place had been held for years by
a steel-engraving, an accurate representation of the Suspension
Bridge at Niagara Falls. It was almost as large as its
successor, the "Colosseum," and it had been presented to Mr.
Adams by colleagues in his department at Lamb and Company's.
Adams had shown some feeling when Alice began to urge its removal