With the first early morning stirrings in the house, the sounds of
opening doors here and there, the penetrating cry of one of the
babies--muffled, to be sure, and a long way off, but still audible--he
came broad awake again, but sat for a while staring about the room; at
the wonderful ornate perfection of the Italian marble chimney-piece that
framed the dying fire; at the tall carved chairs, the simple grandeur of
the three-hundred-year-old table and the subdued richness, in the half
light, of the tapestries that hung on the walls.
It was Florence McCrea's masterpiece, this room. But this morning its
perfections mocked him with the ferocious irony of the contrast they
presented to that other room--that unspeakably horrible room where he
had left Rose. Details of its hideousness, that he hadn't been conscious
of observing during the hours he had spent in it, came back to him,
bitten out with acid clearness;--the varnished top of the bureau mottled
with water stains, the worn splintered floor, the horrible hard blue of
the iron bed, the florid pattern on the hand-painted slop-jar.
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