The Cartoonist stopped with an heroic sneeze to lift one of the "choonks." He dusted the bit of metal and bowed before Felicia. "Here is the key to the secret chamber--" but Felicia instead of playing back with some mocking pretense as she usually did when any of them made melodramatic speeches to her, clasped her hands. "Oh, how stupid I've been! That's the storeroom key! The one I threw away the day I was angry at Mademoiselle D'Ormy! And it tinkled down, down, down--" she was hurrying out of the room." All of us, now, we can go up--the store-room will be fun and maybe--" They were scrambling up the stairways, a laughing crew. "Bring something to break wood with you," called Felice over her shoulder, "for those shelves that Dulcie put over the door that we thought went into the front room--it doesn't go there! Wasn't I stupid! That's the door into the storeroom--it's the long narrow space between the two walls and it had trunks and a bureau--" It still had them! The men folks pulled out the dusty boxes into the immaculate neatness of the nursery floor and for the next two hours they delved and delved through the forgotten treasures. The Poetry Girl called it the "Night of a Thousand Hopes" but the Inventor sardonically added at midnight "of Blasted Hopes--" The nursery looked like a New England attic when they had finished mauling. Felice gave things away recklessly, whenever one of them admired anything. How they all shouted at the Painter Boy when he triumphantly pulled forth a sage green taffeta frock with long bell sleeves, voluminous skirts and quaintly square-cut neck. "Look! all of us!" he shouted buoyantly as he limped across the room to hold it against Felicia's shoulders, "here's her color!" "Put it on her!" begged the Architect's wife. In the end the women dressed her in it while the men folk trooped down stairs to mess Molly's speckless kitchen with their masculine ideas of how to make lemonade. She curtsied to the Painter Boy good-humoredly. "I don't feel at all like me! I feel like Josepha or Louisa or whoever she was who wore it--" she laughed. Her laughter was tremulous in spite of her bravest efforts. They were all of them on the ragged edge of tears. They'd hoped so that the storeroom would give the house back to them! Only the Painter Boy seemed not to care. He waited, his eyes gleaming, until after the others had trooped off to their own quarters, each with his or her bit of the loot. He caught at the hanging green sleeve. For that was the night the Painter Boy came into his own. The night he knew that he was going to paint The Spirit of Romance. "You're so paintable!" he begged, "I know it's rotten to ask you to sit for me, you're so busy now with all of us on your mind and the sewing and posing for Dulcie that you'll think you just can't--but oh, Dulcie Dierckx--look at her! Isn't she paintable!" Dulcie agreed she was. Felicia shook her head.