“Right here, I guess!” answered Mary Louise. “Don’t you think there is room?”
“Perhaps, but it will be kind of higgledy piggledy. I am wondering if we couldn’t use some of this tremendous waste space that is up above and swing a kind of balcony for the pink tea place?”
“Sure we could!” declared Billy. “Why not roof over the housekeeping apartments, or rather, compartments, in the rear and make a nice broad place above them for this new venture?”
“Splendid!” breathed Mary Louise. “The only thing I don’t like about it here is having no roof to my room. Last night the little devil from the Lincoln Cathedral perched himself on the top of my partition and made faces at me all night. I prefer the bronze Buddhas who usually come and look down on me.”
“Well, you shall have a roof now,” said Bob Dulaney with the brotherly tenderness he felt for the little wife of his old friend, “and there will be no room for Lincoln devils or bronze Buddhas or even Humpty Dumpties.”
The very next day, late in the afternoon, the same crowd of young men who had assisted in the carpentry and plumbing of the Higgledy Piggledy Shop, except that poor Danny, who had been the ringleader and director in the former enterprise, was missing, now came with lumber and tools and noisily and quickly laid a floor across the two bed rooms, bath room and kitchenette. The long narrow windows that had given more than enough light and air for the bed rooms were now cut in half and served upper and lower apartments.
Bob Dulaney arrived while the work was in progress, bearing on his strong broad back a small flight of stairs he had ordered made at a factory.
“I’ll bring the bannisters to-morrow,” he panted, as he leant the steps against the wall leading to the balcony above. “I can’t drive a nail straight myself and I remembered Edward Everett Hale’s advice to a young man, ‘Never do for yourself what some one else can do better for you,’ so I just had some one whose business it is to make steps make these and the same genius is making some bannisters.”
Like magic the balcony was built and furnished, the proper connections made for the electrical appliances and even a diminutive sink and water pipes accomplished by the amateur plumbers.
Judicious advertising was done by the clever Elizabeth and in a short while the girls were kept very busy with their new venture. It had looked as though the balcony scheme might make it impossible for Irene to assist, as there seemed no way to get her rolling chair to such an elevation, but Bob Dulaney, again confessing himself unable to cope with mechanics, had an expert come and with longer ropes and more pulleys extend the dumb waiter service to the “mezzanine floor” as he expressed it.