Peach baskets idling with the odds and ends of packing, Ted's red sweater, Nancy's blue one, Nancy's straw hat that she felt she must have within reach and which therefore had been "parked" on the floor, safe, however, under a big chair, and a paste-board box of books that she also didn't want to lose track of, the portable phonograph cover, the phonograph itself was reposing safely on the corner of the sink where Ted had been trying a new record; all these and as many more miscellaneous articles Nancy was briefly encountering in her general clearing up plan "from one door to the other." But she forged on, the old broom doing heroic duty as a plough cutting through the débris. Finally, having gotten most of the stuff into a corner, she undertook to scatter it in a way peculiar to one with business, rather than domestic, instincts. "I'll need the baskets, all of them, when I'm settling the store," she promptly decided, "and I'll get Ted to put the box of books in there too, so I can read while I'm waiting. Then the phonograph--That can go in there just as well, it may draw customers." At this Nancy laughed, but she picked up the little black box, it had been her birthday present, and put it right on the small table under the old mantle in the store. A phonograph in the store seemed attractive. "I guess we'll find the store handy for lots of things," Nancy was thinking, for the difference in the size of their old home, and the limits of this new one, was not easy to adjust. With a sort of flourish of the broom at the papers and bits of excelsior that were still an eyesore about, Nancy at length managed to "make a path," as she expressed it, through the kitchen. "And I'll gather some flowers to greet mother with," she insisted. "There's no reason why we shouldn't make a pretty room of a kitchen like this, with one, two, three, good sized windows," she counted. But the glorious bunch of early roses must have felt rather out of place, trying to conserve their wondrous perfume from contamination with the remains of a smudgy odor from burnt potatoes--which by-the-way, had not yet come to light, not to say anything of the real fire smell of burnt meat, that ran over from a pan-cake griddle into a seething gas flame. "Oh, those flowers!" exhaled the triumphant Nancy, pushing the dishpan away so as not to bend the longest stalk, which was brushed against it. "Won't mother just love it here?" After all, is not the soul of the poet more valuable than the skill of a prospective housewife? CHAPTER VI FAIR PLAY Mrs. Brandon was such a mother as one might readily imagine would be the parent of Nancy and Ted. In the first place she was young, so young as to be mistaken often for Nancy's big sister. Then she was lively, a real chum with her two children, but more important than these qualities, perhaps, was her sense of tolerance.