When he had gone, Cornelia stood in the middle of her dreary little parlor, and looked around with startled eyes. Here she had contracted to have windows put in and the partition taken down, and promised to go into business herself right away at once. What would her father say to it all?
But she could see Harry and Louise coming down the street, and she hurried into the kitchen to prepare the dessert for dinner; for it was getting late for what she had planned.
She must put the new ideas out of her mind and get back to her work, or dinner would be late.
The children came bursting into the kitchen, eager to see how much Carey had accomplished, and clattered down cellar and up again, their hands full of cookies their sister had baked, their eyes happy, and somehow home and life looked good to Cornelia. This was the great day at college when the play on which she had spent so much time and thought was to come off, and she had expected to have a hard time bearing the thought that all that was going on and she not in it; but she never once thought of it all day until just as her head was touching the pillow that night, and then she was so sleepy that it only came as a floating thought of some far-off period of her existence in which she now had no part. She was wholly and entirely interested just now in her home and what she was going to do for the neighborhood. She had not told her father yet about the carpenter and his propositions. She wanted to have something more definite to tell, perhaps to surprise her family with, if possible; so she had merely asked him casually if he objected to her making little inexpensive changes in the house, things that she could manage herself; and he had joyously told her to do what she liked, pull the walls down if she wanted to, only so she got things fixed to please her.
CHAPTER X
Cornelia awoke with a great zeal for work upon her. She had dreamed a living room that would lift the whole house out of the sordid neighborhood and make it a place of delight. She had thought out some built-in seats with lockers where many of the odds and ends could be stowed; she had planned to paint the old, cheap dining-room furniture a wonderful deep-cream enamel and decorate it like some of the expensive sets in the stores; so would she treat the old bedroom sets that were not of real wood. The set in Carey’s room was old walnut and valuable. A little oil would bring it back to its rich brown beauty. The set in her mother’s room was a cheap one; and that she would paint gray with decorations of little pink buds and trailing vines. The set in her own room should be ivory-white with sepia shadows. She would go somewhere and learn how to put on wall-paper, or find a man who would do it very cheaply; and little by little the old house should be made over. Cheap felt-paper of pale gray or pearl or cream for the bedrooms, and corn-color for the living room. She wasn’t sure what she would do with the dining-room yet till she had the furniture painted, perhaps paint the walls white, and tack little moldings in patterns around for panels outlined in green. Green! That was the color for the dining-room furniture. A green and white dining-room, with a fern-dish for the centre of the table and a grass rug under the table. White curtains with green stencilling! That was it! And Carey’s room should be painted white, walls and ceiling and all. She would set him at it as soon as he finished the fireplace, and then she would stencil little birds, or a more conventional pattern around the top of the walls for a border, in the same blue as the curtains. That would be a room to which he could bring home his friends. A picture or two well chosen,—she had the Lone Wolf in her trunk done in steel-blues, the very thing for one,—and an unbleached muslin bedspread and pillow roll also stencilled in blue. That would make a beautiful room. Then the bathroom, of course, must be all white, heavy white enamel. She saw where her money would go now, in pots of paint and brushes, and the work would take days, weeks; but it would be beautiful. She could see her dream before her, and was happy.
She went downstairs, and found the fire out. That made delay. It was her own fault, of course; she had forgotten to look after it the last thing at night, and also everybody else had forgotten. Her father had gone to bed early with a neuralgic headache. He usually looked after the fire. Carey ought to have thought of it, but Carey never thought of anything but himself and his own immediate plans unless his interest was held. Cornelia found on looking for it in her haste that her stock of patience had run low; and added to this she had a stiff shoulder from washing windows, and Harry had a bad toothache, and had to hurry away to the dentist’s. Carey didn’t get up at all when he was called, and Louise and Cornelia had a rough time of it making some coffee for their father over the gas-flame. There was no time to wait for the fire, for father must catch his car at the regular time, whether he had breakfast or not. When Louise had gone off to school, and Harry, returning redolent of cloves and creosote, had also been fed and comforted and sent off with an excuse to his teacher, Cornelia wanted to sit down and cry. Suddenly the whole thing seemed a house of cards. The sordid neighborhood became more sordid than ever, the house too dingy and hopeless for words, all her plans tawdry and cheap and useless. Why try, when the result to be attained at best would be but a makeshift of poverty?
To add to her misery, the morning mail brought letters of condolence from her classmates because she could not be with them at the play, and bits of news about how this and that were going wrong because she wasn’t there, and who was trying to take her place and bungling things.
Suddenly Cornelia put her head down on the dining-room table in the midst of the breakfast clutter, and cried. She felt sorrier and sorrier for herself. Carey upstairs, great, big, lazy fellow, sleeping and letting her make the fire and do the work and carry the burden. He ought to be out hunting a job and helping to fill the family purse. He ought to be up and at his fireplace. She felt like going up and shaking him and telling him just how despicable he was; and she wished she could shut up the house and go off all day somewhere, and have a good time. She was tired, and she loathed the thought of washing windows and scouring the floor and getting meals. Even stencilling curtains had lost its charm.
She became ashamed of herself presently, remembering her mother and how many years she had done all these things and more. She dried her eyes and began to clear off the table. She had barely finished when she had a visitation from the woman next door, who came beaming in to see the curtains her husband had told her about, and to ask whether Cornelia minded her having blue birds on some of her curtains if she put them on the other side of the house. Somehow the woman’s eagerness to have her home made over into an artistic one melted away some of Cornelia’s gloom, and she was able to rise to the occasion and talk with her neighbor almost as enthusiastically as if she had been really interested. Perhaps she was interested; she wasn’t sure. Anyway, it was going to be fun to get rid of ugly things in that woman’s house and substitute simple, pretty ones. When Mrs. Barkley got up to go Cornelia thought she heard faint movements up in the third story, and took heart. When she opened the door to let her neighbor out, promising to run in sometime within a day or two and look over the rooms, the sun shot out from behind a grim cloud, and flooded the damp street with glory; and Cornelia began to feel better.