"You know what that would mean," Portia said darkly.
"Paint everywhere but on the walls," said Lucy, sounding like her own grandmother. She had a green streak in her hair that wouldn't wash out, and Portia's fingernails were purple. But it was all in a good cause; the rooms were beginning to look cheerful, to say the least.
Julian had started a paper route that took him half the morning, and the other boys, too, had part-time jobs.
Mr. Blake's vacation was over; he had had to return to his work in the city and only came out for weekends, but his weekend projects were so numerous that, as he said, he had "to get back to the office to relax."
As for Mrs. Blake, she was seldom seen without something in her hands: hammer and nails, or paint and paintbrush, or lengths of fabric. "You really never get finished with a house," she said contentedly. But sometimes she just wandered quietly from room to room, gloating.
The Villa Caprice continued to offer surprises: certain tall spikey plants near the house turned out to be lilies: great freckled fragrant ones. A drawer in the library desk was discovered to be full of jigsaw puzzles, dominoes, playing cards, and a chess set. Some surprises were not so pleasant: the leak that appeared in the dining room; the peculiar temperament of the bathroom plumbing; the fact that the drawing-room fireplace smoked in rainy weather.
Gradually they became familiar with the sounds peculiar to the house: the stairtread in the hall stairs that chirped like a cricket when anyone stepped on it; the swing door into the dining room that whooshed and sighed; the way the chimneys rumbled when the wind was high. All these were nice because they were the sounds of home.
"This place is home, now," Portia said. "And the apartment in New York is just the place we stay in in wintertime."
"Winter. Ugh," said Foster. "I wish it wouldn't get here for eleven years."
But the summer, as summers are apt to do, was spinning itself out fast, too fast. Already it was August.