“But I like it, and it really does seem as if Providence sent us through that street,” added Polly, sighing with content.
“Eleanor, did you hear Anne say it had stable-doors?” now ventured Mrs. Stewart, fearfully.
“No! did you, Anne? Why would it have stable-doors?”
“Because in the days of horses and carriages, it was some rich man’s private stable,” laughed Anne, enjoying the horror on her mother’s face.
“A stable! Ha, ha, ha—for a Maynard of Chicago! Oh—ha, ha, ha!” laughed Eleanor, rocking back and forth.
Even Mrs. Stewart had to laugh at the picture Eleanor’s exclamation suggested—Mrs. Maynard and Barbara calling upon a member of their family who was living in an East Side stable!
Any doubt of this being just the place they wanted vanished in the morning when Anne and Polly proudly escorted Mrs. Stewart and Eleanor about their future domicile. True, it had all the ear-marks of a stable from the outside, but once you were within, there was only an artistic home to be seen. The ground-floor which had once held four stalls and a harness-room, with space for two carriages, was now partitioned off in a manner that made the most of the space. A large living-room across the front acted as entrance-hall and passageway to the rear rooms and second floor. In the corner of the living-room, where the small brick chimney had served as smoke-vent for the stove of former days, there now was a wide tiled fire-place which would hold great logs.
Double glass-paneled doors led from the front room to the dining-room with its two high-set square windows opening to the sunlight in the rear. Also a single door went to the kitchen, which also had two high windows like those in the adjoining room. From the kitchen, a back door opened upon a tiny grass-platted garden of about twenty feet square. A fine locust tree grew in one corner of the plot and gave shade in the afternoon.
Anne explained certain peculiar features regarding the windows of the back-rooms. “Don’t you see why they are so high? It is because they were once the ventilators to the stalls. Each horse had his own window for air. But I think they now make the rooms look quaint, don’t you?”
The others agreed with her, and Eleanor said: “If we had a shelf running along under the windows, it would look better.”