Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/103

 combing. She saw the tasselled dance-cards, pathetically few, yellowing with age, which hung from the standard which supported the mirror over her dresser. She saw the wash-stand with its cracked bowl and pitcher. She saw the black tin plate that covered the hole in the wall into which the stovepipe was inserted in winter. She turned to her bookcase and saw the row of Cambridge poets: Whittier, Tennyson, Browning, Byron, Pope, Wordsworth. There was one volume, the eighth, of a set of books called Mind. There were textbooks, a hated reminder of the treadmill she would be forced to walk until the end of her days, and a few of the classic and semi-classic authors: Henry Esmond and Diana of the Crossways side by side with a set of Shakespeare and a translation of Œdipus Rex. She reviewed, in this dismal mood, the titles of the more modern books: Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton, More Songs from Vagabondia by Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, Barrie's Sentimental Tommy, William Dean Howells's The Landlord at Lion's Head, James Lane Allen's The Choir Invisible, and Robert Hichens's Flames. On her little writing-desk, on top of her papers, lay a recent copy of the Atlantic Monthly in which she had been reading a new instalment of Paul Leicester Ford's The Story of an Untold Love. Over her desk hung a china plaque which she herself had painted with grapes and roses