I {182} arrived, and the packers brought
her furniture from storage and unpacked it, and set it about
according to their fancy, and cleaned up the mess and departed. We
moved our trunks out the next morning. Mother went up and down and
to and fro, as unsettled as the Cat that Walked. Finally she
demanded of me, "Marvel, what ails this flat?" and I said, "Why,
mother, the colors are all wrong and it is n't cozy."

She threw up her hands in despair. "Is coziness to be the end of our
living?" she demanded; and I said, "It is."

You see, she can explain adorably about beauty in the home, but she
had n't known any better than to leave the tinting to the
kalsominer.--"Kalsomine is his business. He ought to know better
than I," she said. She has such blind faith in specialists,--There
{183} resulted a red dining-room, a terrible green living-room, and
dark lavender bedrooms! No wonder poor little mother was miserable!

Getting it put right was messy, deplorable, and expensive beyond
words; but it is all nice tans now, with charming chintz draperies
and chair-covers. I did the upholstering myself, and it is n't half
bad.

Mother does n't like ugly things, nor get them of her own free will,
but she is obsessed to accept the advice of everybody who pretends
to be a specialist, and they "do" her frightfully. It is one of the
penalties of being a Superwoman.

Getting a cook required diplomacy. It is a point of honor with
mother to take meals in restaurants or buy delicatessen stuff. She
was in the hospital two months with inflammation of the liver last
winter, and dyspepsia makes {184} half her days hideous. If people
will live on indigestible ideas, instead of home cooking, I'm afraid
it's what they must expect! I freely admit that I can't combat
mother's ideas, as ideas,--I'm not clever enough,--but she does n't
know how to be comfortable, which is to be efficient. She is rabidly
against kitchens, but arithmetic demonstrates that here, in Chicago,
this winter, it will cost less, and be more healthful to have a maid
for the season instead of dragging ourselves out in the snow to eat
thirty-cent breakfasts and fifty-cent luncheons and seventy-five
cent dinners, and pay a woman for coming to clean. I argue that, so
long as the Redeemed Form of Society has n't arrived, we are n't
disloyal to it by doing this!

Myra Ann has learned to make Evelyn's beef