The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows,
half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand
piano. There were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into
dim corners and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great
chandelier looked like stalactites in a cave. The girl touched
the piano keys; they were ice under her fingers.
In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the
chandelier, and armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the
unheard-of extravagance of lighting it, not here and there, but
throughout as high as she could reach, standing perilously on her
tiptoes on the chair.
The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed
that the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying;
it revealed the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove
almost so; it let the initiated into the secret that the blackish
fluid in the cups had been made with coffee extract that had been
made of Heaven knows what; and it revealed in the cavernous
corner near the door a number of trunks. The girl, having lighted
all the candles, stood on the chair and looked at the trunks. She
was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A door slammed down
the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into one of
those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony
Wells, a tragedy.
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