With a start Peggy looked up. At the sight of Elaine her face crinkled into a smile of such unmistakable pleasure that only a very peculiar person could have felt indifferent to being its exciting cause. "Why, it’s you, isn’t it?" exclaimed Peggy radiantly, springing from her knees with a haste which came near to overturning the can of paint. "I can’t ask you to take a chair, because the only chair there is is pretty well covered with paint by now. But I’ll pull out the wheelbarrow--" "O, I can’t stay long enough to sit down," Elaine said hastily. She was on the point of saying more, but quite unconscious that she was interrupting, Peggy broke in. "I suppose you wondered what I was doing. You see one of the chairs in my bed-room went to pieces the other day. Amy was sitting on it at the time, and she was quite mortified. Amy is plump, and she decided right away that she wouldn’t eat any more candy for six months, if she was getting so big that ordinary furniture wouldn’t bear her weight." Peggy interrupted herself by an infectious laugh and chattered on, "And so I’ve got to have a new chair--" "A _new_ chair," repeated Elaine, surprise causing her to give a rather impolite emphasis to the adjective. Peggy laughed again. "The new things for my room are a good deal like some folks’ new dresses, the made-over, new kind, you know. But I almost think I like them all the better. Take this chair, for instance." Peggy indicated the article in question by a sweeping gesture of her paint brush. "It isn’t much to look at just now." "No!" Elaine acknowledged, apparently glad to find a point on which she could agree with Peggy. "It isn’t." "It’ll have to have quite a number of coats," Peggy explained. "And when the paint is thick enough, so that the black doesn’t show through, I’ll tack a square of blue denim over the seat. If you put it on with braid and gilt-headed tacks, it is quite effective." Elaine’s start was not due to admiration for the glowing picture Peggy’s words had conjured up, but rather to consternation over her own negligence. "O, I forgot!" she exclaimed, and hesitated. She was so plainly embarrassed that Peggy felt vaguely uncomfortable herself. But she did not have time to wonder why, before Elaine was launched on an explanation. "Mamma sent me over to say that she objects to the smell of paint, and to ask if you would mind--" Elaine hesitated again. Her air of confusion did not seem consistent with the impression Peggy had formed of her. As for Peggy herself, she was equally divided between sympathy for the bearer of the message, and regret over her interrupted task.