“Well, there is waste space here that should be put in the store room.
This little passage from dining-room to kitchen is entirely unnecessary
and should be incorporated in the butler’s pantry. These twin doors in
the hall, one leading to the attic and one to the cellar, are no doubt
very pretty, but they are not wide enough. An attic is for trunks, and
how could one larger than a steamer trunk get through such a narrow
door? A cellar is certainly for barrels and the like, and I am sure it
would be a tug to pull a barrel through this little crack of a door. I’d
allow at least nine inches more on each door, and that means a foot and
a half off something. Let me see. It seems a pity to take it off of the
living-room, and rather inhospitable to rob the guest chamber.
“Aunt Clay always puts the new towels in the guest chamber for the
company to break in. She says company can’t kick about the slick
stiffness of them, and somehow it would seem rather Aunt Clayish to take
that eighteen inches off of the poor unsuspecting guests, whoever they
may be.”
Molly sat a long time studying the plans, and she looked so sweet and so
earnest that Edwin Green thought with regret of the tacit promise he had
made Mrs. Brown: to let Molly stay a child for another year. How he
longed to know his fate! How simple it would be while she was showing
her interest in his little bungalow to ask her to tell him if she
thought she could ever make it her little home, too! Was she the child
her mother thought her? Did she think he was a “laggard in love,” and
despise him for a “faint heart”? Or could it be that she thought of him
only as an old and trusted friend, too ancient to contemplate as
anything but a professor of literature, and, at that, one who was
building a home in which to spend his rapidly declining years?
“Time will tell,” sighed the poor, conscientious young man, “but if I am
letting my happiness slip through my fingers from a mistaken sense of
duty, then I don’t deserve anything but ‘single blessedness’.”
“I have it!” exclaimed Molly. “Have the cellar entrance outside by the
kitchen door with a gourd pergola over both, and take this inside space
where the cellar door and steps were to be for a large closet in the
poor guests’ room, to make up to them for coming so near to losing a
foot and a half off of their room.”
“That suits me, if it suits you. Is there anything else?”
“If you won’t tell Kent it is my suggestion, I do think the bathroom
door ought to open in and not out. He and I have disagreed about doors
ever since we were children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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