one after one
The walls of their rooms were covered with family portraits of the colonial period , and Mrs. Carr , who had parted with most of her treasures , often wondered how they had preserved so many proofs of a distinguished descent . Even her silver had gone -- first the quaint old service with the Bolton crest , which had belonged to her mother ; then , one by one , the forks and spoons ; and , last of all , Gabriella 's silver mug , which was carried , wrapped in a shawl , to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell . She was a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women give only to children , and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit her soul to the portraits on the wall , to the furniture with which she lived , to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother . When one after one these things went from her , she felt as if the very roots of her being were torn up from the warm familiar earth in which they had grown . `` There 's nothing left in the parlour that I should n't be ashamed to have your grandmother look at , '' she had once confessed to her daughters . Seen by the light of history , this parlour , in which so much of Gabriella 's childhood was spent , was not without interest as an archaic survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian mind . The walls were covered with bottle-green paper on which endless processions of dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly toward an embossed border -- the result of an artistic frenzy of the early ` eighties .