Jessamy and she had a rapture after all their friends had gone. It had been a beautiful Christmas Day, and the very nicest evening the girls remembered to have spent; but it was best of all to bid the people good-night, dear as many of them were to them, and sit down alone, a "square" once more, at their "ain fireside," represented, as Babbie pointed out, by a gilded steam radiator.
Jessamy was paid ten to twenty dollars each for her illustrations. She and Phyllis hugged each other in speechless anticipation of the wealth that they were to pile up. Yet a vision of Bobby Shafto, and a look in his eyes that night as they rested on the Sleeping Beauty, as if he would dearly have liked the privilege of waking her in the manner of the prince in the story, filled Phyllis with foreboding that their collaboration might be short. But she was at home again, and everything smiled on their hopes. "A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!" Ah, yes, very, very happy. And with that thought in her grateful heart, Phyllis fell asleep, with Truce purring on her arm.
Four days after New Year's began a week of shut-in weather, the kind of days which drive one nearly frantic, or make one perfectly happy, according to the state of mind in which they find one. The Wyndhams, "squared" once more, with Phyllis back and their home life resumed with nothing to mar it, were in precisely the perfect contentment which hails with rapture weather shutting out the outside world and drawing closer together the inside one. The snow fell steadily for three days, intermittently for four more; the walking was as bad as it could be, and the city lay muffled in stillness that was hypnotic in effect, and helped keep people within doors who had not obligations to force them out.
Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara reveled in the pleasure of donning old gowns every morning and settling down to the achievement of odd tasks without fear of interruption, and also in the chance to get talked up to date after half a year of absence on Phyllis's part. There was an old chair which had outlived its covering, though in a melancholy state of finish, which had been condemned to the tender mercies of the refuse gatherer by all but Bab. She, fired with economical zeal, had long declared that she would enamel it in black, re-cover it, and have practically a new chair at the trifling expense of a can of paint and three quarters of a yard of worsted and linen tapestry. This was precisely the time for which she had waited, when an old sheet could be spread on the parlor rug, and the chair allowed plenty of time to dry, with no danger of callers to be shocked by the sight and sickened by the odor of paint; so during this "spell of weather," as Violet called it, she began the transformation of the chair.