“Yes, you know she does.”
“Fort Myer is just across the river; I wonder if she knows Father.”
“Ask her when you see her,” recommended Ethel Brown, and they all went in to bed as a clap of thunder gave promise of a cooling shower.
CHAPTER VI
SPRING ALL THE YEAR ROUND
It proved to be quite a week later before the workmen were far enough along to make it worth while for Miss Graham to be summoned to a conference on the decoration of the bedroom floor, and when Ethel Blue met her at last she forgot altogether to ask if she knew her dearly beloved father.
There were several reasons why she did not ask. In the first place she had forgotten that she meant to; in the next, Miss Daisy was so absorbed in what she was hearing from all the Club members about their ideas for the bed-rooms, and so interested in comparing them with her own practical knowledge of how they could be carried out, that no one who listened to her or saw her at work wanted to interrupt her with any questions that had no bearing on the matter in hand.
Not that she was not interested in the young people. She was thoroughly interested in them. She knew all of their names and sorted out one from the other immediately just from Margaret’s and James’s descriptions of them. She listened attentively to their suggestions and they all felt that she was treating their ideas with respect and that if she did not always agree with them she had a good reason for it.
“I think she’s the most competent woman almost that I ever saw,” said Helen admiringly to Margaret as they stood at one side of the upper hall and watched her as she rapidly sketched for Mrs. Smith what she meant by a certain plan of window hanging.
Helen was greatly interested in new occupations for women and the fact that this woman had studied to be an interior decorator and had succeeded so well that she had orders from the suburbs of New York itself had impressed the young girl as making her well worth trying to know well. Helen was not drawn toward interior decorating—she had already made up her mind, that she was to be one of the scientific home-makers educated at the School of Mothercraft—but she admired women with the courage to start new things, and this work seemed to her to be perfectly suited to a woman and at the same time of enough importance to be really worth while putting a lot of preparation into it. The dressing of shop windows seemed to her another peculiarly feminine occupation, hardly entered at all, as yet, by women, and capable of being developed into an art.
“The decoration of a room or a building ought to seem a sort of growth from the room or the building,” Miss Graham was explaining to the Ethels. “It ought to seem perfectly natural that it should be there, just as a blossom seems perfectly natural to find on a plant. I never like the phrase ‘applied design,’” she continued, smiling as she turned to Mrs. Smith. “It sounds as if you made a design and then clapped it on to the afflicted spot as if it were a plaster of some kind.”