“Too often it looks that way,” Mrs. Smith smiled in return. “Come and see how we’ve arranged our sleeping porches.”
As Miss Graham stood in the doorway that opened on to the porch of Dorothy’s room, one hand resting on Ethel Brown’s shoulder, Helen felt more than ever the power—for friendliness and good will as well as for the execution of her art—that this dark-eyed, dark-haired, ruddy-cheeked young woman possessed. Her nose was a trifle too short for beauty and her mouth a bit too wide, but her coloring denoted health, her hair curled crisply over a broad forehead, her teeth were brilliantly white, and the straight folds of her gown showed the lines of her strong figure as the strange dull blue-green of her linen frock, dashed with a bit of orange, brought into relief all the good points of her tinting.
“She makes you want to stop and look at her,” Helen decided, “and you want to know her, too.”
Mrs. Smith had arranged for three sleeping porches, one for her own room, one for Dorothy’s, and a larger one outside of the nursery where the Belgian baby enjoyed herself in the daytime. This porch was also shared by Elisabeth’s care-taker. Each porch was on a different side of the house, so that they did not encroach upon each other, and each was somewhat different in arrangement.
“Did you originate this idea?” asked Miss Graham, as she examined the sliding windows by which the bed was to be shut off from the room at night and enclosed in the room in the morning. “You never need step out of bed on to the cold floor of the porch,” she commented approvingly.
“I saw that in a sanitarium,” returned Mrs. Smith. “It was desirable that the patients should never be chilled and the doctor and architect invented this way of preventing it.”
“It’s capital,” smiled Miss Graham, “and so simple. When the inside sash is closed, the outside is up, and vice versa. Are they all like this?”
“Yes,” answered her hostess. “Dorothy is to have a couch in that corner, and a table and chairs. There is to be a screw eye attached to the foot of the couch. A weight on the end of a cord will go through a pulley fastened to the wall, high up over the head of the couch. There will be a hook at the other end of the cord. When this hook goes into the screw eye and the weight is pulled, the couch will stand on its head and will be out of the way at any time when floor space is more to be desired than lying down comfort.”
“Of course there will be some sort of drapery to cover the under side when it is hauled up against the wall,” said Miss Graham with a question in her voice.
“Dorothy has something in mind that is going to meet that difficulty, she thinks,” answered Mrs. Smith.