Now, however, she was far from done. The paint dry, she restored her two pieces of furniture to their rightful places. The dressing-table box she skirted with cheesecloth dipped in blued starch; and covered the top of it with a roll of crinkly, flower-sprinkled tissue paper. To the general effect, her cretonne-encased pillow gave the final touch. It was Johnnie's opinion that the pillow was one of the most beautiful things in New York. When it was stood up stiffly against the wall at the end of the narrow bed shelf; when the picture of Colonel Roosevelt was again in its place of honor beside the bit of mirror, with the handsome Edwarda leaned negligently just beneath; and when Cis had lavished upon her bed and box the delicious scent of a whole nickel's-worth of orris root, Johnnie, wildly enthused, signaled the flat above. "I'll bet there ain't any room that's nicer'n this in the whole Waldorf 'Storia!" he vowed to the little Jewish lady when she came rocking down to marvel over the transformation, hands uplifted, head wagging. "Don't you think it's fine, Mrs. Kukor? and don't it smell 'zac'ly like Mrs. Reisenberger?" "Pos-i-tivvle!" agreed Mrs. Kukor. Next, in her housewifely zeal, Cis started in to improve the kitchen. Keeping the ladder an extra day by special permission she climbed it to wash the eight small panes of the window, after which she hung at either side of them a strip of the blue-tinted cheesecloth. But when Barber saw the curtains, he called them "tomfoolery," and tore them down. So nothing happened to the rest of the flat. That rebuke of Barber's seemed to deflect Cis's interest from the rooms to herself. For now upon her own person she wrought improvements. These did not escape Johnnie, who accepted them as a part of the general upheaval--an upheaval which she informed him was "Spring cleaning." Each night before retiring she pressed her one dress, and freshened its washable collar; she also brushed her hair a full hundred times, conscientiously counting the strokes. As for her teeth, Johnnie warned her that she would wear out both them and the ivory-handled brush in no time, since, night and morning, she used the brush tirelessly. Also she wasted valuable hours (in his opinion) by manicuring her fingernails when she might better have been threading a kitchen jungle all beast-infested. Next, another, and the most startling change in her. She came out of her blue room one morning looking very tall, and odd. At first Johnnie did not see what was wrong, and stared, puzzled and bewildered. But Barber saw. "What's the idea?" he wanted to know, and none too pleasantly. "I'm almost seventeen," Cis answered. Almost seventeen! Johnnie looked at her closer, and discovered the thing that made her different. It was her hair. Usually she wore it braided, and tied at the nape of her neck. But now that shining braid was pinned in a coil on the back of her head!