The furniture was of white and gold, the vases of
Sevres, a few admirable prints on the walls and roses everywhere.
Left to her reflections, poor Peg found herself wondering how
people, with so much that was beautiful around them, could live and
act as the Chichester family apparently did. They seemed to borrow
nothing from their once illustrious and prosperous dead. They were,
it would appear, only concerned with a particularly near present.
The splendour of the house awed--the narrowness of the people
irritated her. What an unequal condition of things where such people
were endowed with so much of the world's goods, while her father had
to struggle all his life for the bare necessities!
She had heard her father say once that the only value money had,
outside of one's immediate requirements, was to be able to relieve
other people's misery: and that if we just spent it on ourselves
money became a monster that stripped life of all happiness, all
illusion, all love--and made it just a selfish mockery of a world!
How wonderfully true her father's diagnosis was!
Here was a family with everything to make them happy--yet none of
them seemed to breathe a happy breath, think a happy thought, or
know a happy hour.
The maid had placed Peg's scanty assortment of articles on the
dressing-table.
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