But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew
what a vicious influence it had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck
and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the
everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd,
unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths
didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little
higher than the other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all
know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and
get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain
furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.
I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old bureau used to
have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.
I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I
could always hop into that chair and be safe.
The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for
we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as
a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I
never saw such ravages as the children have made here.
The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh
closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as
hatred.
Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster
itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed, which is
all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.
But I don’t mind it a bit—only the paper.
There comes John’s sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful
of me! I must not let her find me writing.
She is a perfect, and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better
profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me
sick!
But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these
windows.
There is one that commands the road, a lovely, shaded, winding road,
and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too,
full of great elms and velvet meadows.
This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a
particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights,
and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I
can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to
sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
There’s sister on the stairs!
Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired
out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we
just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.
Of course I didn’t do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.
But it tired me all the same.
John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell
in the fall.
But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his
hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more
so!
Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.
I don’t feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for
anything, and I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.