“I can think how it might be jolly-nificent!” cried Barbara, relapsing into her dislocations.

“You like kitchens,” said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet ill-usedness.

“Yes, I do,” said Barbara.  “And you like parlors, and prettinesses, and feather dusters, and little general touchings-up, that I can’t have patience with.  You shall take the high art, and I’ll have the low realities.  That’s the co-operation.  Families are put up assorted, and the home character comes of it.  It’s Bible-truth, you know; the head and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that.  Let’s just see what we shall come to!  People don’t turn out what they’re meant, who have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike.  There’s a great deal in being Holabirdy,—­or whatever-else-you-are-y!”

“If it only weren’t for that cellar-kitchen,” said Mrs. Holabird.

“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 glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a gleam of silver and glass,—­the two or three pretty engravings in the few spaces 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 shiny 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.”