Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/121

 intolerable depression, to realize the advantages of a quiet life in what was surely the same pleasant, cultured atmosphere to which she had so eagerly looked forward three years ago. Her room was large, well furnished, perfectly heated; and if the condition of her closet would have appeared nothing short of appalling to a householder, that condition was owing to the hopeless exigencies of the occasion. With the exception of that whited sepulchre, all was neat, artistic, eminently habitable. She surveyed it critically: the “Mona Lisa,” the large “Melrose Abbey,” the Burne-Jones draperies, and the “Blessed Damozel” that spread a placid if monotonous culture through the rooms of educated single women. A proper appreciation of polished wood, the sanitary and aesthetic values of the open fire, a certain scheme in couch-pillows, all linked it to the dozen other rooms that occupied the same relative ground-floor corners in a dozen other