The oak settle near the fire, the oak sideboard running along one side of the room, the black oak table with carved legs at which they sat, were genuine pieces of old Westmoreland work, which had belonged to their grandfather.

The heavy carpet covering the stone floor of what twenty years before had been the kitchen of the farm-house was a survival from a south-country home, which had sheltered their lives for eight happy years.

Over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of the girls' father, a long serious face, not unlike Wordsworth's face in outline, and bearing a strong resemblance to Catherine; a line of silhouettes adorned the mantelpiece; on the walls were prints of Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals, photographs of Greece, and two old-fashioned engravings of Dante and Milton; while a bookcase, filled apparently with the father's college books and college prizes and the favorite authors--mostly poets, philosophers, and theologians--of his later years, gave a final touch of habitableness to the room.

The little meal and its appointments--the eggs, the home-made bread and preserves, the tempting butter and old-fashioned silver gleaming among the flowers which Rose arranged with fanciful skill in Japanese pots of her own providing--suggested the same family qualities as the room.

Frugality, a dainty personal self-respect, a family consciousness, tenacious of its memories and tenderly careful of all the little material objects, which were to it the symbols of those memories--clearly all these elements entered into the Leyburn tradition.
And of this tradition, with its implied assertions and denials, clearly Catherine Leyburn, the eldest sister, was, of all the persons gathered in this little room, the most pronounced embodiment.