ot promised to do this or
that. People were always trying to see her for some reason or no
reason, and it was said that the best time to find her was at table.
This was not so easy; the meals had a certain range in time, and the
landlady was nominally at the head of the table; but those who came
early to find her made the mistake of not having come late, and if you
came late you just missed her. Yet she was sometimes actually to be
encountered at the head of the stairs from the kitchen, or evanescing
from the parlor; and somehow the house was operated; the meals came and
went, and the smell of their coming and going filled the hall-way from
the ground floor to the attic. Some people complained of the meals, but
Cornelia's traditions were so simple that she thought them a constant
succession of prodigies, with never less than steak, fish and hash for
breakfast, and always turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner, and often
ice-cream; sometimes the things were rather burnt, but she did not see
that there was much to find fault with. She celebrated the luxury in
her letters home, and she said that she liked the landlady, too, and
that they had got to be great friends; in fact the landlady reminded
the girl of her own mother in the sort of springless effectiveness with
which she brought things to pass, when you would never have expected
any result whatever; and she was gentle like her mother, and
simple-hearted, with all her elusiveness. But she was not neat, like
Mrs. Saunders; the house went at loose ends. Cornelia found fluff under
her bed that must have been there a long time. The parlor and the
dining-room were kept darkened, and no one could have told what
mysteries their corners and set pieces of furniture harbored. The
carpets, where the subdued light struck them, betrayed places worn down
to the warp. Mrs. Montgomery herself had a like effect of unsparing
use; her personal upholstery showed frayed edges and broken woofs,
which did not seriously discord with her nerveless gentility.

The parlor was very long and rather narrow, and it was crossed at the
rear by the dining-room which showed the table in stages of preparation
or dismantling through sliding-doors never quite shut. At intervals
along the parlor walls were set sofas in linen brocade and yellow jute;
and various easy and uneasy chairs in green plush stood about in no
definite relation to the black-walnut, marble-topped centre-table. A
scarf, knotted and held