low as autumn woods! And some perfectly frivolous
pictures which aren't in the least inspiring or uplifting,--and every
single girl's room shall have a _pink pincushion_!" Then at their
blankness, she softened. "Oh, very well,--you shall have your tubs and
your linoleum, if you'll let me humanize the rest of the house,--will
you?" She came to her feet with a spring of incredible energy. "Come
along, Miss Ellis,--let's have a look upstairs! We don't need you,
M.D.--this is woman-stuff."

The superintendent pulled herself upstairs with a sticky hand on the
banister, "Well, I don't know where you'd begin, Miss Vail. Everything's
threadbare...."

They went through drab halls and into drab rooms where drab occupants
greeted them drably, and Jane ached with the ugliness of it. Wasn't it
going to be fun--_if_ the play went over "big"--to vanquish this much of
the hideousness of the world?

She stopped before a closed door. "What is this?"

Miss Ellis was walking past it. "That's my room."

"Well, may I see it?"

"Oh," she said, colorlessly, "I didn't suppose you'd want to fix _it_
over...." She opened the door and stepped in, crossing to the undraped
window and running up the stiff shade of faded and streaked olive green.

"But of course I shall," said Jane, following her in. "Well--I might
have known!"

"What?" asked Miss Ellis, defensively.

"That you'd take the smallest and shabbiest room in the house for
yourself."

"Oh, well ... it doesn't matter. I'm not in it very much." She walked
over to the warped golden oak bureau and straightened the metal button
hook with the name of a shoe shop pressed into it into line with the
whisk broom. Besides these two articles there bloomed upon the bureau's
top a small pincushion made from a piece of California redwood bark, and
a widowed saucer enrolled as a pin-tray, and into the frame of the mirror
was stuck a snapshot of an unnecessarily plain small boy.

"That's my little nephew," said Emma Ellis, seeing Jane's eye upon it.
"My sister Bertha's boy."

"He--he looks _bright_, doesn't he?" said Jane, hastily. She looked
about her, consideringly. "You know, I'd like to do this room in deep
creamy yellow. That will make it look lighter and seem larger, and it
will be nice with your hair."

"My hair?..." said Miss Ellis, limply.

"You have such nice hair, but I do wish you'd do it differently," said
Jane with anxious friendliness. "You have a _mile_ of it, haven't you?"