l is unusual.

"Is Mr. Madison at home? My name is Valentine Corliss."

"He is at home." She indicated an open doorway upon her right.
"Will you wait in there?"

"Thank you," said Mr. Corliss, passing within. "I shall be----"
He left the sentence unfinished, for he was already alone, and at
liberty to reflect upon the extraordinary coolness of this cool
young woman.

The room, with its closed blinds, was soothingly dark after the
riotous sun without, a grateful obscurity which was one of two
attractions discovered in it by Mr. Corliss while he waited. It
was a depressing little chamber, disproportionately high,
uncheered by seven chairs (each of a different family, but all
belonging to the same knobby species, and all upholstered a
repellent blue), a scratched "inlaid table," likewise knobby, and
a dangerous looking small sofa--turbulent furniture, warmly
harmonious, however, in a common challenge to the visitor to take
comfort in any of it. A once-gilt gas chandelier hung from the
distant ceiling, with three globes of frosted glass, but
undeniable evidence that five were intended; and two of the three
had been severely bitten. There was a hostile little coal-grate,
making a mouth under a mantel of imitation black marble, behind an
old blue-satin fire-screen upon which red cat-tails and an owl
over a pond had been roughly embroidered in high relief, this owl
motive being the inspiration of innumerable other owls reflected
in innumerable other ponds in the formerly silver moonlight with
which the walls were papered. Corliss thought he remembered that
in his boyhood, when it was known as "the parlour" (though he
guessed that the Madison family called it "the reception room,"
now) this was the place where his aunt received callers who, she
justifiably hoped, would not linger. Altogether, it struck him
that it might be a good test-room for an alienist: no incipient
lunacy would remain incipient here.

There was one incongruity which surprised him--a wicker
waste-paper basket, so nonsensically out of place in this arid
cell, where not the wildest hare-brain could picture any one
coming to read or write, that he bestowed upon it a particular,
frowning attention, and so discovered the second attractive
possession of the room. A fresh and lovely pink rose, just opening
full from the bud, lay in the bottom of the basket.

There was a rustling somewhere in the house and a murmur, above
which a boy's voice became audible