The Wishing Carpet — Context and Discussion

eautiful Oriental rug which seemed singularly out of place in the ugly and characterless sitting room. Color, design, and texture were exquisite. A fanciful person, contrasting it with the strident carpet, the atrocious vases and pictures, the glistening golden oak furniture, might have thought it was like a nobleman, briefly taking refuge in the mean hut of a peasant.

“Mummie, dear!” The child was insistent. “Is that a Wishing Carpet?”

Her mother did not answer immediately. Her blue gaze, with its habitual expression of brooding pathos, rested on the rug, and she sighed mistily before she spoke, which was her vaguely irritating custom. She had the effect of pleading with the world to be sorry for her. This seemed, to busy and hard-headed people, a waste of time--she was so patently and amply sorry for herself.

“Yes, darling,” she replied at length, gently and tremulously, “it _is_ a Wishing Carpet in a way, because, for nine long years I’ve been looking at it and wishing for things I knew I could never have!”

“Well, maybe,” Glen Darrow suggested hopefully, “you didn’t stand right on it with your eyes shut tight and your left hand on your heart, like the old witch said?” Then, as Mrs. Darrow shook her head--“Well, when I wish I’ll wish the right way!” She patted her mother’s knee again, consolingly, this time. “And I won’t wish till I have to, and then I’ll wish for something I think is going to happen anyway!”

That was her father in her, the woman reflected rather peevishly. That was Glenwood Darrow all over. No striving after higher things, no yearning.... Well, doubtless she would be better off. The fine-fibered, over-sensitive people of the world were never really happy, as no one knew better than herself.... Effie Darrow’s soft eyes filled and her soft chin quivered.

The doctor had married her eyes without noticing her chin. She had played the small, sobbing organ in the church he boredly attended while he earned a summer vacation by caring for a godly and epileptic youth. The top of the hymn book had cut her face in two. Glenwood Darrow saw only a white brow under fine, fair hair, a mild gaze, blue and beautiful, celestially sweet. The chin and the ineffectual mouth with its permanent sag at the corners were not discovered until too late.

Young Glen’s eyes were like her mother’s in size and coloring, but there was a drastic difference in their expression: they were not in the least wistful or appealing. Features, however, were not going to matter very much with Glen Darrow, because of the hair which framed her face in a veritable flame of shimmering, blazing red, bequeathed by some ancestor who was not even a legend on either side of the house.

People stopped and stared at it: sometimes the child could feel them touching it with a tentative finger, as if to see if it really radiated heat.

“All right. Never mind!” she said now, closing the issue of the Wishing Carpet. “Go on, Mummie!”

The woman read steadily in her pretty and plaintive voice, but she was not aware of the adventures of the prince and the princess and the wicked witch, because her thoughts were making a melancholy pilgrimage, walking backward....

When Dr. Darrow had brought her from her prairie town to Chicago she was startled to find that he had already furnished the flat, office and living quarters, in his own exuberant taste. She winced visibly when her eyes fell upon the magenta and mustard colored roses in the carpet, and lifted to the idealized Brussels sprouts on the wall paper, but she had darted toward the Persian rug with a little cry of pure pleasure.

“Oh, Glenwood! How _lovely_!” Here, at last, was something she could whole-heartedly praise, and she knelt and worshiped it. “I heard a missionary lecture on Oriental rugs, once, and then I got a book and studied, and I know enough to realize that this is really fine!” Her soft little hand was held up to him. “Oh, dearest, I think you were wonderful to choose it for me!”

Her bridegroom was ruefully honest. “Didn’t choose it. It’s a G. P.”

“‘Grateful Patient.’ Old Mrs. Ludermann, only rich family on my books. Most of this junk”--he waved a complacent hand--“is wedding presents.”