"They didn't want me to bring the furniture, Willy and his father, when we came," Charlotte told Alexina; "it cost more to get it here than to buy new, but I didn't want new; I wanted this."
Everything was innocent of covers or hangings, nor were there any pictures. She explained this.
"I don't know how to drive nails," she told them, "and Willy and the Captain don't care. Willy had the house papered this fall in case of people coming about buying, and the papering men took the nails out the walls and he won't bother to put them in. They're all in here."
Charlotte didn't mean the nails; she threw open a closet door and ancestral Ransomes, neatly set against the walls, peered out of the dark.
Alexina put a hand over Charlotte's on the door knob. Molly yawned.
"It seems chilly here in my room," said Charlotte; "the sun isn't round this side yet. Put your hats on the bed and Mrs. Garnier shall go lie on Willy's sofa."
They followed her across the hall. "He has his bed and things in there," she explained, nodding towards an adjoining room, "and he keeps his books and such in here."
On the floor, otherwise uncarpeted, lay a bearskin. There was a sofa against the wall and a plain deal table in the centre of the room, piled with papers, books and pipes, about a lamp. There were some chairs; a gun-rack, antlers, an alligator skin and some coloured prints of English hunting scenes on the walls, and an old-fashioned, brass-mounted cellarette hung in an angle. The south window looked out across the grove upon Nancy; between the two east windows stood an old secretary book-case.
Charlotte suggesting that Mrs. Garnier put on a wrapper, the two went back to her bed-room. Alexina stood hesitating. She felt a sense of surreptitiousness and embarrassment, and then took a step to the book-case--any one might do that much--and read the titles of the books.
About orange culture and fertilizing these first seemed to be, and those next were concerned with the breeding of stock. They meant Woodford and the future, probably. She skipped to the other shelves. Buckle's Introduction to the History of Civilization, Hallam's Middle Ages, Wealth of Nations, Wilhelm Meister, Poems of Heinrich Heine, several volumes of Spencer and Huxley, Slaves of Paris, Lecocq, the Detective, File No. 118, The Lerouge Case, The Scotland Yard Detective, Carlyle's French Revolution, Taxidermitology, Renan's Life of Jesus, Pole on Whist, Hoyle, Tom Sawyer, Past and Present, Pickwick Papers, Herodotus, an unbroken shelf of Walter Scott, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Cousin Pons, Drainage, Pendennis, Small Fruit Culture.