Alice Sit-By-The-Fire

								

woman’s touch is everywhere; if you are not hand-sewn you are almost
certainly hand-painted, but incompletely, for Amy in her pursuit of
the arts has often to drop one in order to keep pace with another.
Some of the chairs have escaped as yet, but their time will come. The
table-cover and the curtains are of a lovely pink, perforated
ingeniously with many tiny holes, which when you consider them against
a dark background, gradually assume the appearance of something
pictorial, such as a basket of odd flowers. The fender stool is in
brown velvet, and there are words on it that invite you to sit down.
Some of the letters of this message have been burned away. There are
artistic white bookshelves hanging lopsidedly here and there, and they
also have pink curtains, no larger than a doll’s garments. These
little curtains are for covering the parts where there are no books as
yet. The pictures on the walls are mostly studies done at school, and
include the well-known windmill, and the equally popular old lady by
the shore. Their frames are of fir-cones, glued together, or of straws
which have gone limp, and droop like streaks of macaroni. There is a
cosy corner; also a milking-stool, but no cow. The lampshades have had
ribbons added to them, and from a distance look like ladies of the
ballet. The flower-pot also is in a skirt. Near the door is a large
screen, such as people hide behind in the more ordinary sort of play;
it will be interesting to see whether we can resist the temptation to
hide some one behind it.
A few common weeds rear their profane heads in this innocent garden;
for instance a cruet-stand, a basket of cutlery, and a triangular dish
of the kind in which the correct confine cheese. They have not strayed
here, they live here; indeed this is among other things the
dining-room of a modest little house in Brompton made beautiful, or
nearly so, by a girl, who has a soul above food and conceals its
accessories as far as possible from view, in drawers, even in the
waste-paper basket. Not a dish, not a spoon, not a fork, is
hand-painted, a sufficient indication of her contempt for them.
Amy is present, but is not seen to the best advantage, for she has been
washing her hair, and is now drying it by the fire. Notable among
her garments are a dressing-jacket and a towel, and her head is bent
so far back over the fire that we see her face nearly upside-down.
This is no position in which we can do justice to her undoubted facial
charm. Seated near her is her brother Cosmo, a boy of thirteen, in
naval uniform. Cosmo is a cadet at Osborne, and properly proud of his
station, but just now he looks proud of nothing. He is plunged in
gloom. The cause of his woe is a telegram, which he is regarding from
all points of the compass, as if in hopes of making it send him better
news. At last he gives expression to his feelings. ‘All I can say,’ he
sums up in the first words of the play, ‘is that if father tries to