  After they had shown all the rest of the house to Miss Daisy the family party gathered on the brick terrace outside of the drawing room to investigate lemonade and little cakes. The Ethels had brought the lemonade from home in a thermos bottle which kept it cool and refreshing, and that morning Dorothy had made some “hearts and rounds” which proved most appetizing with the cool drink. A few canvas chairs which Mrs. Smith had sent over from home, so that she might have something to sit down on when she visited the new house, were all the furniture of the veranda, but the girls found several boxes which the workmen had left, and they laid planks on them and made benches that were entirely comfortable. A similar arrangement with the boxes turned on their ends provided a little table on which they placed the refreshments. Paper cups answered every necessary purpose, although they were not beautiful, and paper plates held the hearts and rounds just as well as if they had been china. They were all a little tired after walking about the house for so long a time, and those of them who had chairs leaned back with satisfaction and looked over the low parapet to the adjoining meadow with its brook and its cluster of woods at the upper end. Beyond the fields the Emersons’ house could be seen dimly through the trees. “We wondered in the springtime whether we should be able to see this house from Grandfather’s house,” said Ethel Brown. “I haven’t looked lately, but I guess we can, or else we shouldn’t be able to see Grandfather’s house from here.” “The line of those far-away mountains is very beautiful against the sky,” Miss Graham noticed, with her keen observation of everything that added to the loveliness of the landscape. “They are far enough away to have a blue haze hanging over them,” said Mrs. Smith, “and they give you a feeling that our quiet country scene here has a great deal of variety after all.” “Your house is admirably placed to make the most of every beauty around you,” said Miss Daisy, “and I hope you’ll allow me to compliment you on the way it is turning out. You know they say that you have to build two or three houses in order to build one exactly to your satisfaction, but I should think that you were almost accomplishing that with your first attempt.” “I am glad you like so many things about it,” said Mrs. Smith. “Dorothy and I would be pleased with almost any house that really belonged to us, for we’ve had nothing of our own for many years, but of course it is a tremendous satisfaction to have this develop into something that is beautiful and livable too.” “You’ve added so many happy touches,” said Miss Graham. “Take for instance this terrace. A brick terrace always makes me think of some old country house in England, with its dark red walls buried among the brilliant green foliage. So many of those houses have terraces like this, partly roofed like yours, and wide enough to be really an extra room.” “Aunt Louise’s terrace is really two extra rooms,” said Ethel Blue, “because it opens from the drawing room and also from the dining room.” “We’re going to have all our meals out here in pleasant weather, whenever it’s warm enough,” said Dorothy. “I can see you’re sufficiently afraid of New Jersey mosquitoes to have a part screened.” “It’s the only prudent thing to do,” returned Mrs. Smith. “Jersey mosquitoes are really more than a joke, but if you have this wire cage to get into you can defy them. You can see that at the end of the terrace opposite the dining room our cage covers the whole of the floor, while up at this end only a part is wired in. In the evening when the buzzers are buzzing we can take shelter behind the screen, but in the daytime we can sit outside as we’re doing now.” “Are you going to glass it in winter? I see you have a radiator.” “There are to be long glass sashes that fit into the same grooves that hold the screens now. The open fire will take off the chill on autumn mornings and the radiator ought to keep us warm even when the snow is banked against the glass.” “With palms and rubber plants and rugs and wicker chairs and tables—I suppose you’ll have wicker?” Mrs. Morton interrupted herself to inquire of her sister-in-law. “Yes, wicker, but we haven’t decided between brown or green,” and Mrs. Smith turned appealingly to Miss Graham. “Neither, I should say. Don’t you think a dull dark red, a mahogany red—would be pretty with this brick floor?” “And against the concrete wall. I do; and it ought not to be hard to find rugs with dull reds and greens that will draw all those earthy, autumnal shades together.” “You might have one of those swinging settees hanging by chains from the ceiling.” “Dorothy would enjoy that.” “So would we,” interposed Ethel Brown. “I seem to see myself perching on it, waving my lemonade cup.” “Don’t illustrate all over me,” remonstrated Ethel Blue, dodging the flowing bowl. “I like very much the seclusion you’ve gained by building up the wall at the end of the terrace on the side toward the road,” said Miss Graham. “We found that people could see from the road any one sitting on the terrace, although we’re so high here,” said Mrs. Smith, “but with the parapet built up at that end, they can’t see anything, even though there is an opening in the wall.” “And the window frames a lovely picture of the meadows across the road from you.” “I don’t see,” said Ethel Brown, “why you always call your living room a drawing room, Aunt Louise.” “It isn’t a living room,” returned Mrs. Smith. “A living room is really a room which is used both as a sitting room and a dining room. No room which is used for only one of those purposes should be called a living room.” “Lots of people do,” insisted Ethel Brown. “But they are not right,” returned her aunt. “Drawing room seems a very formal name for it,” Helen said. “Of course we’re used to it, because Grandmother Emerson always calls her parlor a drawing room, but she has a huge, big room, so my idea of a drawing room is always something immense.” “Perhaps it is rather old-fashioned and stately,” admitted Mrs. Smith; “but the drawing room is simply a place where the family withdraws to sit together and talk together, and it need not be any more formal than the people who use it. But I protest that my drawing room or sitting room, or whatever it may be, shall not be called a living room, because it is not devoted to eating as well as sitting.” “I am glad you make that distinction,” said Miss Graham. “So many people are careless about using the word and nowadays you seldom find a real living room except in a bungalow in the country where people are living very informally during the summer, and where space is limited. There’s another thing about your house that I like exceedingly,” she continued, “and that is your closets.” Mrs. Morton, who had joined the party on the terrace, laughed heartily at this praise. “That ought to please you, Louise,” she said, and added, turning to Miss Graham, “Louise has spent more time inventing all sorts of cupboards and closets than in drawing the original plan of the house, I really believe.” “I know it wasn’t wasted time,” returned Miss Graham. “I have every sympathy with a craze for closets. You can’t have too many to suit me. Do you remember that room at Mt. Vernon entirely surrounded by cupboards and closets? I always thought Washington must have had an extraordinarily orderly mind to want to have all his dining room belongings carefully placed on shelves behind closed doors!” “I wonder how many different kinds of closets we have,” murmured Dorothy, beginning to count them up on her fingers. Everybody tossed in a contribution, naming the closet which she happened to remember. “A coat closet near the front door,” said Ethel Brown. “Clothes closets in every bed-room and two extra ones in the attic,” added Mrs. Smith. “A dress closet with mirrors on the doors, that turn back to make a three-fold dressing glass. I envy you that comfort, Louise,” said Mrs. Morton. “You’ll notice that the coat closets and the clothes closets all have long poles with countless hangers on them,” said Mrs. Smith. “They’ll hold a tremendous number of garments; many more than Dorothy and I have.” “The closet I’m craziest about is the one that is filled with glass cubes to put hats in,” said Helen. “You open the door and there are half a dozen, and you can see the hats right through, so you don’t have to keep pulling out one box after another, always getting the wrong one first.” “That’s a perfectly splendid idea,” approved Miss Graham. “I suppose along the lower part of the closet side of your room, you have small closets and cupboards for shoes and for blouses.” “I have my blouse closet above my shoe closet,” returned Mrs. Smith. “Did you notice the tall, thin closet for one-piece dresses?” asked Ethel Blue. “I should think that would be splendid because it doesn’t jam up your evening dresses,” said Helen, who was beginning to think longingly of real, grown-up evening dresses. “That’s the closet Ethel Blue always calls the ‘stepmother closet,’” laughed Ethel Brown. “Why ‘stepmother closet’?” inquired Miss Graham quickly. “Because it would pinch a stepmother so hard if she got into it,” said Ethel Blue. Miss Graham looked puzzled and Dorothy explained. “Ethel Blue hates stepmothers. She doesn’t know why, except that they are always horrid in fairy stories, but she thinks this long narrow closet would be just the place to put a horrid one into to punish her.” “Stepmothers are often very nice,” said Mrs. Morton. “I had a stepmother,” said Miss Graham, “and I couldn’t have loved my own mother more tenderly, and I’m sure she loved Margaret’s mother and me quite as well as if we had been her own children. In fact, I think she was more careful of us than she was of her own children. She used to say we were a legacy to her and that she felt it her duty as well as her delight to be extra good to us, for our mother’s sake.” Ethel Blue listened and smiled at the kind brown eyes that were smiling at her, but she shook her head as if she were unconvinced. “At any rate you might select your closet to fit your stepmother,” Miss Daisy laughed, “and if you wanted to be very bad to a thin one, you could make her squeeze up small in one of the glass hat boxes, and a fat one would suffer most in this narrow closet of yours.” They all laughed again and went on with the list of closets in the house. “You noticed, I hope,” said Mrs. Smith, “that almost every closet in the house has an electric bulb inside that lights when you open the door and goes out again when the door is closed.” “Splendid,” approved Miss Graham. “Is there one in your linen closet?” “Yes, indeed. Did you notice that the linen closet is on the bedroom floor? There need be no carrying up and down stairs of heavy bed linen. The linen for the maid’s room, in the attic, is kept in a small linen closet up there, and the table linen belongs in a closet made especially for it in the dining room. It has many glass shelves quite close together, so that each table cloth may have a spot to itself and the centrepieces and doilies may be kept flat with nothing to rumple them.” “I suppose the medicine closets will go into the bath-rooms when the other fittings are installed,” said Mrs. Morton. “Yes,” returned her sister-in-law. “Did you notice the pretty cedar shavings that the carpenters left on the floor of the cedar closet?” asked Dorothy. “They say they always leave the cedar shavings they made, because people like to put them among their clothes to make them fragrant.” “I’m glad you are having a cedar closet,” said Margaret. “Mother got along with a cedar chest for a great many years, but she has always longed for a cedar closet. She had one built this summer.” “We have both,” said Dorothy. “The chest is going up in the attic and the closet is on the bedroom floor.” “The thing that pleases me most in the closet line,” said Ethel Brown, who is a good cook, “is the pastry closet just off the kitchen. The carpenter told me there was a refrigerating pipe running around it so that it would always be cool, and there was to be a plate glass shelf on which the pastry could be rolled out.” “You certainly have the latest wrinkles,” exclaimed Mrs. Morton admiringly. “I have never seen that arrangement in real life. I thought it only existed in large hotels or the women’s magazines!” “There are lots of other little comforts in our house,” laughed Dorothy, “and there are two or three more kinds of closets if we count bookcases that have doors and cupboards to keep games in.” “They’re every one modern and useful except that stepmother squeezer,” said Miss Graham, rising to take leave. “That sounds like some invention of the Middle Ages when people used to torture each other to death so cheerfully.” “O, I wouldn’t torture her,” protested Ethel Blue. “Unless she were a really truly fairy story bad one,” Miss Daisy insisted. “Could you resist that?” She held Ethel Blue’s eyes for just a second with her smiling gaze that was graven down in the depths of her warm brown ones. “I wouldn’t really hurt her,” Ethel Blue repeated, and wondered why she felt as if she had been taken seriously. |
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