This room had proved the hardest spot in the house to make attractive, for it seemed to resist all efforts to make a well-furnished room of it. Most of the faded paper was loose and much of it had dropped off in patches during the time that the cottage was vacant, showing the ugly, dark, painted wall underneath. It was only too evident that the pictures that the girls had fastened up carefully with pins had been put up for purposes of concealment, the ceiling was stained and dingy, and the rug was far too small to cover the floor where some industrious former occupant had daubed paint of various gaudy hues while trying, perhaps, to find the right shade for the woodwork.
Moreover, what little furniture there was in the dining-room showed very plainly that it had not been intended originally for dining-room use; the buffet, in particular, proclaimed loudly in big black letters that it was nothing but a soap box, and Bettie's best efforts could not make anything else of it. Now that the day for the long-postponed dinner party was actually set, the girls' attention was more than ever directed toward the forlorn appearance of the little dining-room.
"Dear me," said Bettie, one day when the five friends, seated around the table, were cutting out pictures for a wonderful scrap-book for the little lame boy whom Miss Blossom had discovered living near one of the churches, "I do wish this dining-room didn't look so sort of bedroomy."
"Yes," said Jean, "I've tried putting the buffet in every corner and all around the walls, and it won't look like anything but a wooden box."
"I tried covering it with a gathered curtain," said Mabel, "but that made it look so like a washstand that I took it off again."
"Why," exclaimed Miss Blossom, "you've given me a beautiful idea! I believe we could make a splendid sideboard out of that piano box that's so in our way on the back porch. We'd just have to saw the ends down a little, nail on some boards, paint it some plain, dark color, and spread a towel over the top, and we'd have a beautiful Flemish oak sideboard. I'll buy the can of paint."
"I'll do the painting," said Jean. "I helped Mother paint our kitchen floor, so I know a little about it."
"That would be lovely. I've been thinking, too, that it would be a good idea to fix a little shelf under this window to hold your petunia and these two geraniums that are suffering so for sunshine. I think I could make it from the boards in that soap box."
"Oh, thank you!" cried Bettie. "I don't believe there's anything you don't know how to do."
The piano box, transformed by Miss Blossom and the four girls into a very good imitation of a Flemish oak sideboard, did indeed make such an imposing piece of furniture that the rest of the room looked shabbier than ever by contrast.