It was a weary but a happy party that returned to Rosemont in the late afternoon.
“One of these days is awfully hard on your head,” confessed Roger, as he was talking to his mother about the Club’s experience, “but it certainly is good for your gray matter.”
“We’re going to remember whenever we look at pictures again,” said Ethel Brown.
“And there are lots of things in it that we shall think about when we look over the decorating in our house,” insisted Dorothy.
“What I thought was the nicest of all was the way Miss Graham taught us. It was just like talking. I think she is awfully nice,” was Ethel Blue’s decision.
CHAPTER XV
PREPARATIONS FOR THE HOUSEWARMING
The trip to the Metropolitan Museum gave every member of the party a new set of words for her vocabulary. They looked at pictures with opened eyes and talked of their “composition” and “balance.” They were all of them more or less interested in photography and now they tried to take photographs that would be real pictures.
“It isn’t so easy to make a picture by selecting what you want to have and leaving out the things you don’t want,” said Roger to Helen one morning as they walked toward Sweetbrier Lodge, “when the things are right there in the landscape and won’t get out of the camera’s way. A painter would leave out that stupid old wooden house in the field there, but he’d leave in the splendid elm bending over it. Now if I ‘shoot’ the elm I’ve got to ‘shoot’ the house, too.”
“The only way out is to take the house at some angle that will show off any good points it may have,” declared Helen, wrinkling a puzzled brow.
“Then as likely as not you’ll have to take the tree on the side where the lightning hit it and peeled off all its bark,” growled her brother gloomily.