Part 13 (1/2)

”Mother,” said Ruth, ”what if we were to take this?”

We were in the dining-room.

”This nice room!”

”It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know.”

Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,--the new, pretty drugget,--the freshly clad, broad old sofa,--the high wainscoted walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,--the ceiling faintly tinted with buff,--the buff holland shades to the windows,--the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with its gla.s.s upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a gleam of silver and gla.s.s,--the two or three pretty engravings in the few s.p.a.ces for them,--O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a kitchen.

But Ruth began again.

”You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we _might_ bring the kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen.”

”But the stove,” said mother.

”I think,” said Barbara, boldly, ”that a cooking-stove, all polished up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!”

”It is clumsy, one must own,” said Mrs. Holabird, ”besides being suggestive.”

”So is a piano,” said the determined Barbara.

”I can _imagine_ a cooking-stove,” said Rosamond, slowly.

”Well, do! That's just where your gift will come in!”

”A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a s.h.i.+ny tin boiler, made to order,--like an urn, or something,--with a copper faucet, and nothing else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use; it _might_ be like that little picnicking dower-house we read about in a novel, or like Marie Antoinette's Trianon.”

”That's what it _would_ come to, if it was part of our living, just as we come to have gold thimbles and lovely work-boxes. We should give each other Christmas and birthday presents of things; we should have as much pleasure and pride in it as in the china-closet. Why, the whole trouble is that the kitchen is the only place taste _hasn't_ got into. Let's have an art-kitchen!”

”We might spend a little money in fitting up a few things freshly, if we are to save the waste and expense of a servant,” said Mrs.

Holabird.

The idea grew and developed.

”But when we have people to tea!” Rosamond said, suddenly demurring afresh.

”There's always the brown room, and the handing round,” said Barbara, ”for the people you can't be intimate with, and _think_ how crowsy this will be with Aunt Trixie or Mrs. Hobart or the Goldthwaites!”

”We shall just settle _down_,” said Rose, gloomily.

”Well, I believe in finding our place. Every little brook runs till it does that. I don't want to stand on tip-toe all my life.”

”We shall always gather to us what _belongs_. Every little crystal does that,” said mother, taking up another simile.

”What will Aunt Roderick say?” said Ruth.

”I shall keep her out of the kitchen, and tell her we couldn't manage with one girl any longer, and so we've taken three that all wanted to get a place together.”

And Barbara actually did; and it was three weeks before Mrs. Roderick found out what it really meant.

We were in a hurry to have Katty go, and to begin, after we had made up our minds; and it was with the serenest composure that Mrs.