Grandma
Orde, on the other hand, was a very small, spry old lady, with a
small face, a small figure, small hands and feet. She dressed in
the then usual cap and black silk of old ladies. Half her time she
spent at her housekeeping, which she loved, jingling about from
cellar to attic store-room, seeing that Amanda, the "help," had
everything in order. The other half she sat in a wooden "Dutch"
rocking-chair by a window overlooking the garden. Her silk-shod
feet rested neatly side by side on a carpet-covered hassock, her
back against a gay tapestried cushion. Near her purred big Jim, a
maltese rumoured to weigh fifteen pounds. Above her twittered a
canary.
And the interior of the house itself was in keeping. The low
ceilings, the slight irregularities of structure peculiar to the
rather rule-of-thumb methods of the earlier builders, the deep
window embrasures due to the thickness of the walls, the unexpected
passages leading to unsuspected rooms, and the fact that many of
these apartments were approached by a step or so up or a step or so
down--these lent to it a quaint, old-fashioned atmosphere enhanced
further by the steel engravings, the antique furnishings, the many-
paned windows, and all the belongings of old people who have passed
from a previous generation untouched by modern ideas.
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