And sometimes Weenie won, and Dolly was jammed helplessly up against her table, and a heroine had to wait in the middle of an impassioned speech, while Weenie leisurely extricated a pair of gloves, or a catapult, or a box of chocolates from the drawer.
Clif and Ted at last took pity on the literary pair, and, as a joint Christmas present, built them a little wooden room at the end of the verandah.
The girls were delighted, and indeed all the house took interest in seeing them establish themselves in the tiny place when the carpenters pronounced the long-awaited word, “Finished.”
They set to work and papered the walls themselves, and even Ted, who at first had been quite annoyed at the idea of his carpentering being covered up, was forced to admit that the aesthetic covering of green marguerites was an improvement. True, Richie, who had too fine an eye, pointed out the vexatious facts that some of the widths had the flowers upside down, that there were blisters and bubbles in places, that one or two pieces showed a tendency to curl away from the wall, but no one else was hypercritical. The room was about seven feet square, so there was space for no furniture beyond a little table and a chair each. The chairs stood back to back, touching each other, so [238] ]that if one writer in the throes of an idea that would not reduce itself to words, moved restlessly, the other was forced to protest. On the walls, hanging book-shelves held every volume the girls possessed; and like most of the shelves that depend from a cord, these had an irritating knack of occasionally tilting forward, or sloping sideways, and showering their contents on the owners’ heads. Photographs, little pictures, and nick-nacks filled every available corner; under each table was a little waste-paper basket; on each table a tiny ink-bottle and fancy pen—Richie’s gifts—a vase of flowers, sixpenny statuettes of Milton and Shakespeare, a photograph or two, a penwiper, a stamp-sponge, a doll’s saucer filled with paper fasteners.
“Now we can write,” said the girls, and they set out neat little stacks of paper, and dipped their new gilt pens into the new ink, and held their elbows well to their sides as they wrote, lest they should disturb any of the pretty decorations on their tables.
There was a window in the room, a tiny affair that remained from an old greenhouse, and while the room was new the family used to be always going along the verandah on tip-toe and peeping at the would-be authoresses.
But Ted came into the dining-room one evening when the room was a couple of months old. “Look here,” he said, “I don’t believe those little monkeys [239] ]do a thing but talk and fix up the pictures and things in there. A lot of good it is to them.”
“Dolly was writing down in the orchard to-day,” volunteered Freddie.
“Phyl’s scribbling in her bedroom now,” Richie said.
Clif and Ted went up-stairs two steps at a time to see, and there was Phyl writing by a candle in her room, and Dolly, her washing-stand in a glorious muddle, her arms spread out, covering paper at a surprising pace in hers.