Her mother-in-law was there, knitting and rocking as though she had not stirred. She rushed out, ran through the flat into the sitting room. Lelia sprang up, faced the door, her hands, behind her, catching the linen cover of the dressing table and twisting it into folds. That gaunt woman disappeared from the doorway, silent as a bat. Like a shadow in the glass, like the shadow of a ghost, she saw the image of her mother-in-law standing back of her at the door, sneaking to spy on her. Her lips persisted in curving into a smile. She leaned forward to stare at her reflection, patting her lips, trying to make them narrow and stern. “Now I look like a business woman,” she told herself delightedly. She brushed it with long strokes, which made it glitter like falling water, and put it up in a severe straight parting. Her hair was of the bright brown color of a new-fallen maple leaf. She studied her coiffure, the swirl across one side of her head. “I will be a somebody!” she declared, her lips moving with the words. She sat and thought about it, her elbows among the pretty things of silver and ivory she had brought to this sparse room, her hands pressing her cheeks and making a triangle of her face. “Capable - I want to make myself look capable not so silly and useless,” she said. When the old woman disappeared Lelia sighed and wandered to her dressing table. She had nothing else to do, nothing else to look at. Lelia listlessly watched an old woman, whose hair was confined in a dust cap made of a dish towel, come out on the porch of the mansion and shake a duster. But society had moved away the mansion was a boarding house on the porch was a couch, once gilt and brocade, now broken-backed and played upon by dirty children. The mansion, with its square two-story tower, its windows of colored glass under Moorish arches, had once been fashionable.
Those little ankles were meant for dancing out in the sunlight, but they were still now as she stared at her only view, the Barnes Mansion next door.
She was a winged spirit, slender and quick, and full of generous gayety. The only sign of breathing life was Lelia, at the window.
Lelia always compared this thin odor with the drained light of the sunless room. No amount of window opening ever got rid of the stale smell of soap and musty linen. The iron bedstead shouldered a large, costly, intolerant bureau of black walnut.
The brown woodwork was grained in a cheap paint, which had cracked into thousands of jagged squares.
The wallpaper in Lelia’s bedroom was cream-colored - a cream soured and streaky - with a pattern of ingeniously hideous chrysanthemums in faded red.