"I can think how it might be jolly-nificent!" cried Barbara, relapsing into her dislocations. "_You_ like kitchens," said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet ill-usedness. "Yes, I do," said Barbara. "And you like parlors, and prettinesses, and feather dusters, and little general touchings-up, that I can't have patience with. You shall take the high art, and I'll have the low realities. That's the co-operation. Families are put up assorted, and the home character comes of it. It's Bible-truth, you know; the head and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. Let's just see what we _shall_ come to! People don't turn out what they're meant, who have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike. There's a great deal in being Holabirdy,--or whatever-else-you-are-y!" "If it only weren't for that cellar-kitchen," said Mrs. Holabird. "Mother," said Ruth, "what if we were to take this?" We were in the dining-room. "This nice room!" "It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know." Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,--the new, pretty drugget,--the freshly clad, broad old sofa,--the high wainscoted walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,--the ceiling faintly tinted with buff,--the buff holland shades to the windows,--the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a gleam of silver and glass,--the two or three pretty engravings in the few spaces for them,--O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a kitchen. But Ruth began again. "You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we _might_ bring the kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen." "But the stove," said mother. "I think," said Barbara, boldly, "that a cooking-stove, all polished up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!" "It is clumsy, one must own," said Mrs. Holabird, "besides being suggestive." "So is a piano," said the determined Barbara. "I can _imagine_ a cooking-stove," said Rosamond, slowly. "Well, do! That's just where your gift will come in!" "A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made to order,--like an urn, or something,--with a copper faucet, and nothing else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use; it _might_ be like that little picnicking dower-house we read about in a novel, or like Marie Antoinette's Trianon."