“Here is the family hearth,” said Mrs. Smith to Dorothy, “and we want to make this room beautiful—one that people will like to come into and to stay in.”
“It must not be cold in color, then,” said Dorothy. “Nobody likes to stay in a chilly looking room.”
“And it ought not to be too warm in color,” said plump little Della, who suffered terribly from the heat in summer. “It just makes me perspire to think of some of the thick, heavy-looking rooms I’ve been in. They are only suitable for zero weather and we don’t seem to have any more zero weather nowadays.”
Mrs. Smith had allowed Dorothy to ask the club members to have cocoa with her on the afternoon when the final decisions were to be made. They had brought down from up-stairs some of the chairs and a table which had already been put into the bed-rooms. Dorothy and the Ethels had made cocoa and had baked some cocoanut cakes on the new electric oven, and they were all gathered in the drawing room, sipping their cocoa and looking about them at the possibilities of the room.
“Before we begin, tell me how you made these cakes,” said Margaret, who was always adding a new receipt to her cook book.
“We took half a pound of dried cocoanut and two ounces of sugar and three ounces of ground rice, and mixed them all up together. Then we beat the whites of three eggs perfectly stiff and stirred the froth thoroughly into the other things,” said Ethel Brown.
“Then we dipped out a tablespoonful at a time and put it on to a buttered baking tin, and baked it all in a quick oven for five minutes,” said Ethel Blue, “but we didn’t take the tin out, right off. We let the oven cool and the little cakes cook slowly for half an hour longer.”
“They do be marvellous good,” murmured James, and all the others agreed with him.
Miss Graham had come over with Margaret and James, but she said that she was not going to give her professional advice until it was asked for.
“I may as well tell you first of all,” said Mrs. Smith, “what my color scheme is for this room, and then you can help me with the details. I want the whole thing to be in tones of brown, lightened by yellow, and contrasted with that dull blue you see in Oriental rugs. Now, keep that scheme of color in your mind and work it out for me.”