t _is_ awfully good," Peace informed her. "_I_ think it is the best."

"So do I!" "And I!" came the chorus of surprised voices as the last door
swung open and the beauties of the third chamber burst upon their view.

"It makes me think of fire-crackers," Cherry pensively observed.

"Nobody but Peace would ever have thought of such a thing," Faith put
in.

"A regular Fourth of July room," stuttered the President when he had
recovered his voice enough to speak. "Girlies, how did you do it?"

"Well," confessed Peace, meditatively chewing her finger in her endeavor
to appear modest in the midst of such unstinted praise, "at first we
didn't know what to do. The other girls kept talking about 'propriate
colors for their complexions. Faith is all _blunette_ and she looks best
in pink. Hope is all blonde and blue is her best color, while Gail and
Cherry have _blunette_ hair and blonde eyes, and they chose yellow and
green. I didn't know it then, but that is what they did. Anyway, they
talked about the different colors till I thought we ought to have our
rooms fixed up in things that fitted us. That made it hard for Allee and
me, you see, 'cause she is all blonde and I'm all _blunette_. To fit
her, the room would have to be all blue, and to fit me it would be all
red. Gussie said it wasn't stylish to use red and blue together any
more, so we didn't know what to do until one day when we were
_rummelging_ through the attic we found heaps and heaps of perfectly
whole bunting and two great, big flags. That decided us to make a flag
room of ours, and Gussie said it was a _splen-did_ idea. So that's how
it happened.

"Allee and me'd rather sleep together so's we can talk when we are
awake, instead of having to holler our thoughts clear across the room
from one bed to the other whenever we want to talk secrets; so we traded
beds with Gussie. She said she was willing, and I always did want that
bird of a bed after I saw it in her room. But the curtains wouldn't hang
from its tail like I thought they would, and we--"

"Stole my Paris doll to hold 'em up with!" cried Cherry, spying for the
first time the beautiful waxen image dressed to represent the Goddess of
Liberty, which stood on a tiny mantel over the quaint little bed, and
held the bunting curtains in one hand.

"We _borrowed_ it," Peace corrected. "We couldn't very well _ask_ you
'bout it without your teasing to know why, and Allee and me didn't have
a decent doll among us