"I never knew you had all these rooms," Elizabeth said. "Why, the old house is enormous, isn't it?"
"The front o' the house is new; it hasn't been built more'n fifty years at the outset, but these back chambers belong to the old house—the one your great-grandfather built to go to housekeeping in." She flung open a door that led into a little room still beyond.
"Oh, what a darling, what a sweetheart of a room!" Elizabeth cried. "Whose was it?"
"It was your Aunt Helen's room. She had it papered in this robin's egg blue paper, and she got a lot o' old, painted furniture, and fixed it up real cunning. I thought maybe you might like to do the same thing."
There was only one portion of the room in which Elizabeth could stand upright. The roof sloped gradually until it met the partition about shoulder high, where two tiny, square windows, of many panes, were set; but the main part of the chamber, in spite of its low ceiling, was big enough to hold all the essentials of comfortable furnishing.
"You could hunt around through the house and the attic chamber until you found the things you wanted to put in it, and furnish it just according to your taste, and nobody would ever set foot inside of it unless you happened to want them to. I know girls. That's what they want."
"I guess you do know girls, Grandma," Elizabeth said. "I guess Aunt Helen must have had a good time growing up if you let her do things like this. I don't remember her much."
"Well, that ain't so remarkable. She's lived in China since before you was born. I ain't never let anybody use this room, but now I kinder think her lease has expired. She's got daughters as big as you, and sons that's grown men now."
"I'll be just as good to her room!"
"I guess you can't help it. There's a good spirit in it. You rummage around in these different rooms here, and then you go up in the barn chamber and look till you find the things that suits you. There's a powerful lot of what some folks calls antiques around this place. Dealers and what-not is always coming around and begging to look through my pantry and my attic, wanting to buy all Grandmother's pretty dishes, and a good many that warn't so pretty, but I tell 'em all that when I'm ready to part with 'em I'll let 'em know."