Besides the furniture, this part of the attic was crowded with a great collection of bedroom crockery, pitchers, basins, bowls of all sizes and shapes; boxes piled on boxes, and trunks on trunks; there was another dressmaker's dummy, rather stouter than Baron Bloodshed; there was an agitated-looking sewing machine, an agitated-looking typewriter, both rusty; and a large, elaborate bird cage that must once have housed a parrot. "Things and things to look at and discover, all summer long," Portia gloated. "Now where does this door go, I wonder?" "Well, let's find out." The door was at the end of the attic storeroom. Julian turned the handle and gave a shove; for a wonder it yielded easily. Opening off a narrow corridor were six small rooms, three to a side, each with an iron bedstead, a washstand, a small looking glass, and a mousetrap. The little rooms smelled musty and dry, the wallpaper was stained, and fallen plaster lay on the floors. Portia found a broken rosary in one room, and on the wall of another there was a tacked-up faded postal card, showing the picture of a lighthouse. It looked very forlorn. "I guess this is where she kept her servants," Julian said. "In these horrid little rooms?" Portia was shocked. "Why, they're like the rooms in a jail!" But then she remembered the tale of how Mrs. Brace-Gideon had been in the habit of acquiring two kittens for pets each summer, and then when it was time to return to the city, she would take them to the vet's and have them chloroformed (until Baby-Belle Tuckertown had outwitted her). "I think Mrs. Brace-Gideon was a--was a--what's that word that means you do whatever you want no matter who doesn't want you to?" Portia demanded. "Ruthless?" "Yes. I think she must have been a _ruthless, ruthless_ lady!" "Aunt Minnehaha says she wasn't so bad," Julian said. "Just too rich to understand much. Anyway, lots of people treated their servants that way in those days." Portia looked at the narrow corridor, at the narrow, neglected rooms. They made her feel dreary, as though other people's dreariness still lingered there. "Well, I know _one_ thing," she said. "Someday, I'm going to fix these rooms up so they'll look cheerful." * * * * * That afternoon Portia and Julian were dispatched to Gone-Away to invite Mrs. Cheever for a cup of tea. "If anyone knows why those beautiful things are stuck away in the attic, she will," said Mrs. Blake. And it was true. After they had escorted Mrs. Cheever back and after she had cautiously mounted the attic stairs and done her share of grown-up furniture-worshiping, they all returned to the drawing room for tea poured out of a Thermos bottle, and she told them what she remembered.