Ethel Morton at Sweetbriar Lodge Part 14

"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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.

CHAPTER VIII "OFF TO PHILADELPHIA IN THE MORNING"

"Helen," called Mrs. Morton a few days later just after the morning visit of the letter carrier, "I have a note here from Uncle Richard asking me if I can run over to Philadelphia and attend to a little matter of business for him. He is so tied up at Fort Myer that he can't possibly get away. Do you think it would be pleasant if you and I went over for a few days and took Roger and the children with us?"

The "children" of the Morton family meant those younger than Roger and Helen. Helen received the suggestion with a cry of delight.

"It would be just too lovely for anything," she said, waving in the air the little linen dress she was making for Elisabeth.

"The younger girls had the Ma.s.sachusetts trip this summer that you and Roger didn't share," her mother said. "I think this time we might all of us go, and I'm not sure that it would not be pleasant to ask the Watkinses and the Hanc.o.c.ks."

"The whole U. S. C.!" cried Helen. "Mother, you certainly were born a darling. How did you ever think of anything so perfectly galoptious?"

"It's natural for me to be 'galoptious,'" her mother returned, laughing.

"Now, we shall have to work fast, if we are going to accomplish Uncle Richard's errand, because the people whom he wants me to see will be in Philadelphia only to-morrow. He has telegraphed them, asking them to keep an hour for me, so I must go over to-day or very early to-morrow morning."

"Would you like to have me call up Margaret and Della on the telephone and see if they can go to-day? If they can, I don't see why we can't fly around tremendously and get our bags packed this morning and take an afternoon train," said Helen, who was beginning to grow energetic as the full prospect of the pleasure before her appeared before the eyes of her mind.

Mrs. Morton agreeing, Helen flew to the telephone, and was lucky enough to catch Margaret at Glen Point and Della in New York without any difficulty. They both said that they would consult their mothers and would call Helen again within an hour. She then telephoned to Dorothy, but found that she was at Sweetbrier Lodge and as the telephone had not been put in yet, she was, for a moment, at a loss what to do. She remembered, however, that Ethel Brown and Ethel Blue had spoken of spending the morning at Grandmother Emerson's, and she therefore called up her house in the hope that they might be there.

They had just left there to go and do a little house-cleaning in the cave in Fitzjames' woods, where they frequently enjoyed an afternoon lemonade.

Mrs. Emerson said, however, that she could easily send a messenger after them, and that it would not be many minutes before she would ring Helen in her turn.

"I haven't anything to report," Helen said to her mother after she had made these various calls, "but I had better be getting out our handbags and trying to find Roger, I suppose."

Mrs. Morton was already packing her valise with her own and d.i.c.ky's requirements and she nodded an a.s.sent to Helen's suggestion.

It was not many minutes before the telephone bell began ringing. The first summons was from Margaret Hanc.o.c.k who said that her mother and father were delighted with the opportunity to have her and James go to Philadelphia in Mrs. Morton's care.