Ethel Morton at Sweetbriar Lodge Part 11

"She liked it especially because it had been sheathed, following all the ins and outs. She thought the irregularity was pretty. She suggested a closet for furs over the kitchen. It won't cost much to bring the refrigerating pipes up there, she says."

"That's bully. Aunt Louise may take care of my fur gloves for me next summer if the moths don't eat them up this year," promised Roger who had stopped in the doorway to hear Ethel Brown's report, and stood with the still sleeping d.i.c.ky over his shoulder.

"She suggested a raised ledge about fourteen inches high to stand trunks on."

"Then you don't break your back bending over them when you're hunting for something," exclaimed Helen. "That's splendid. She seems to have practical ideas as well as ornamental ones."

"She thought there ought to be a fire bucket closet up there, too. You know Aunt Louise has had them put in on all the other floors, but she didn't think of it there."

"What is it?" asked Mrs. Morton.

"Just a narrow closet with four shelves. On each of the lower three are fire buckets to be kept full of water all the time and on the top shelf are some of those hand grenade things and chemical squirt guns. They don't look very well when they're right out in sight. This way covers them up but makes them just as convenient. There is to be no lock on the door of the closet and FIRE is to be painted outside so every one will know where it is even if he gets rattled when the fire really happens."

"Are the maids' rooms to be on the attic floor?" asked Mrs. Morton.

"Two little beauties, and a bath-room between them. One room is to be pink and the other blue and they're going to have ivory paint and fluffy curtains just like Dorothy's."

"Did you think to say anything to Miss Graham about the Club's using the attic in winter for weekly meetings?"

"Dorothy did. She thought a movable platform would be a great scheme; one wide enough for us to use for a little stage when we wanted to have singing or recitations up there. She picked out a good place for the phonograph, where the shape of the ceiling wouldn't make the sound queer, and she thought rattan furniture stained brown would be pretty, and scrim curtains--not dead white ones, but a sort of goldeny cream that would harmonize with the wood. There are lovely big cotton rugs in dull blues, that aren't expensive, she says; and if we don't want to see the row of trunks and chests against the wall we can arrange screens that will shut them out of sight and will also take the place of the pictures that you can't hang on a wall that slopes the wrong way."

"I don't see, then, but Aunt Louise will have an attic and we'll have a club room and both parties to the transaction will be pleased," beamed Helen, who, as president of the Club was always careful that the members should be comfortable when they gathered for their weekly talking and planning and working.

"Doesn't Miss Graham come from Was.h.i.+ngton?" asked Ethel Blue dreamily, half awakening to the conversation.

"Yes, you know she does."

"Fort Myer is just across the river; I wonder if she knows Father."

"Ask her when you see her," recommended Ethel Brown, and they all went in to bed as a clap of thunder gave promise of a cooling shower.

CHAPTER VI SPRING ALL THE YEAR ROUND

It proved to be quite a week later before the workmen were far enough along to make it worth while for Miss Graham to be summoned to a conference on the decoration of the bedroom floor, and when Ethel Blue met her at last she forgot altogether to ask if she knew her dearly beloved father.

There were several reasons why she did not ask. In the first place she had forgotten that she meant to; in the next, Miss Daisy was so absorbed in what she was hearing from all the Club members about their ideas for the bed-rooms, and so interested in comparing them with her own practical knowledge of how they could be carried out, that no one who listened to her or saw her at work wanted to interrupt her with any questions that had no bearing on the matter in hand.

Not that she was not interested in the young people. She was thoroughly interested in them. She knew all of their names and sorted out one from the other immediately just from Margaret's and James's descriptions of them. She listened attentively to their suggestions and they all felt that she was treating their ideas with respect and that if she did not always agree with them she had a good reason for it.

"I think she's the most competent woman almost that I ever saw," said Helen admiringly to Margaret as they stood at one side of the upper hall and watched her as she rapidly sketched for Mrs. Smith what she meant by a certain plan of window hanging.

Helen was greatly interested in new occupations for women and the fact that this woman had studied to be an interior decorator and had succeeded so well that she had orders from the suburbs of New York itself had impressed the young girl as making her well worth trying to know well.

Helen was not drawn toward interior decorating--she had already made up her mind, that she was to be one of the scientific home-makers educated at the School of Mothercraft--but she admired women with the courage to start new things, and this work seemed to her to be perfectly suited to a woman and at the same time of enough importance to be really worth while putting a lot of preparation into it. The dressing of shop windows seemed to her another peculiarly feminine occupation, hardly entered at all, as yet, by women, and capable of being developed into an art.

"The decoration of a room or a building ought to seem a sort of growth from the room or the building," Miss Graham was explaining to the Ethels.

"It ought to seem perfectly natural that it should be there, just as a blossom seems perfectly natural to find on a plant. I never like the phrase 'applied design,'" she continued, smiling as she turned to Mrs.

Smith. "It sounds as if you made a design and then clapped it on to the afflicted spot as if it were a plaster of some kind."

"Too often it looks that way," Mrs. Smith smiled in return. "Come and see how we've arranged our sleeping porches."

As Miss Graham stood in the doorway that opened on to the porch of Dorothy's room, one hand resting on Ethel Brown's shoulder, Helen felt more than ever the power--for friendliness and good will as well as for the execution of her art--that this dark-eyed, dark-haired, ruddy-cheeked young woman possessed. Her nose was a trifle too short for beauty and her mouth a bit too wide, but her coloring denoted health, her hair curled crisply over a broad forehead, her teeth were brilliantly white, and the straight folds of her gown showed the lines of her strong figure as the strange dull blue-green of her linen frock, dashed with a bit of orange, brought into relief all the good points of her tinting.

"She makes you want to stop and look at her," Helen decided, "and you want to know her, too."

Mrs. Smith had arranged for three sleeping porches, one for her own room, one for Dorothy's, and a larger one outside of the nursery where the Belgian baby enjoyed herself in the daytime. This porch was also shared by Elisabeth's care-taker. Each porch was on a different side of the house, so that they did not encroach upon each other, and each was somewhat different in arrangement.

"Did you originate this idea?" asked Miss Graham, as she examined the sliding windows by which the bed was to be shut off from the room at night and enclosed in the room in the morning. "You never need step out of bed on to the cold floor of the porch," she commented approvingly.

"I saw that in a sanitarium," returned Mrs. Smith. "It was desirable that the patients should never be chilled and the doctor and architect invented this way of preventing it."

"It's capital," smiled Miss Graham, "and so simple. When the inside sash is closed, the outside is up, and vice versa. Are they all like this?"

"Yes," answered her hostess. "Dorothy is to have a couch in that corner, and a table and chairs. There is to be a screw eye attached to the foot of the couch. A weight on the end of a cord will go through a pulley fastened to the wall, high up over the head of the couch. There will be a hook at the other end of the cord. When this hook goes into the screw eye and the weight is pulled, the couch will stand on its head and will be out of the way at any time when floor s.p.a.ce is more to be desired than lying down comfort."

"Of course there will be some sort of drapery to cover the under side when it is hauled up against the wall," said Miss Graham with a question in her voice.

"Dorothy has something in mind that is going to meet that difficulty, she thinks," answered Mrs. Smith.

"Are you going to have your room of any decided color," asked Miss Graham.

"I've been perfectly crazy for a rose-colored room, ever since I was a tiny child," answered Dorothy. "I've set my heart on this room's looking like a pink rose--"

"Or a bunch of apple blossoms?" asked Miss Graham.

Ethel Blue looked quickly at the decorator when she made this suggestion which at once stirred the young girl's imagination to a mental sight of a springtime tree laden with cl.u.s.ters of blossoms, whose delicate white was flushed with the delicate pink of the dawn. The suggestion appealed to her immediately as possible of a development far more exquisite than that which Dorothy had planned. Both would be pink, yet the fineness of the new color scheme seemed to her suited to Dorothy's slender grace. She could not have put it into words but she felt that Miss Graham had a feeling for color that enabled her to adapt the room in which the color was to be used to the personality of the young girl who was chiefly to use it. Instinctively she moved closer to Miss Graham and met her smiling glance with a nod and smile of understanding.

Dorothy liked the new idea.

"I think an apple-blossom room would be perfectly lovely," she exclaimed.

"If Mother would only let me use wall-paper--I saw such a beauty pattern the other day. There were cl.u.s.ters of apple-blossoms all over it."

"Are you going to use wall-paper," Miss Graham asked Mrs. Smith.

"Dorothy and I decided that we would not use wall-paper in the bed-rooms at any rate," answered Dorothy's mother.

"I wish we hadn't," pouted Dorothy, but she was cheered when Miss Graham nodded her approval of their decision.

"You're quite right," she said. "Apart from the sanitary side it isn't a good plan to paper walls until the plaster is thoroughly dry. This is especially true of a house built on the side of a hill."

"This house has such a wonderful concrete foundation," said Margaret, "that I should think it would be always perfectly solid."

"So should I," answered Miss Graham, "but there's always a chance that some part of the soil beneath may give a little when the full weight of a house rests upon it. The settling of a house for only a half inch or an inch would play havoc with the plaster on these walls."

"You think we'd better hold back the paper for a final resort?" asked Mrs. Smith.