Low easy-chairs and a lounge, small fanciful tables, a dainty desk, gayly colored baskets of worsteds or mysterious kaleidoscopic fragments, and vases of flowers pervaded the apartment with a mingled sense of grace and comfort.

There was a womanly refinement in its careless negligence, and even the delicate wrapper of Japanese silk, gathered at the waist and falling in easy folds to the feet of the graceful mistress of this charming disorder, looked a part of its refined abandonment.
Clarence hesitated as on the threshold of some sacred shrine.

But Mrs.
Peyton, with her own hands, cleared a space for him on the lounge.
"You will easily suspect from all this disorder, Mr.Brant, that I spend a greater part of my time here, and that I seldom see much company.

Mr.
Peyton occasionally comes in long enough to stumble over a footstool or upset a vase, and I think Mary and Susy avoid it from a firm conviction that there is work concealed in these baskets.

But I have my books here, and in the afternoons, behind these thick walls, one forgets the incessant stir and restlessness of the dreadful winds outside.