“Don’t illustrate all over me,” remonstrated Ethel Blue, dodging the flowing bowl.
“I like very much the seclusion you’ve gained by building up the wall at the end of the terrace on the side toward the road,” said Miss Graham.
“We found that people could see from the road any one sitting on the terrace, although we’re so high here,” said Mrs. Smith, “but with the parapet built up at that end, they can’t see anything, even though there is an opening in the wall.”
“And the window frames a lovely picture of the meadows across the road from you.”
“I don’t see,” said Ethel Brown, “why you always call your living room a drawing room, Aunt Louise.”
“It isn’t a living room,” returned Mrs. Smith. “A living room is really a room which is used both as a sitting room and a dining room. No room which is used for only one of those purposes should be called a living room.”
“Lots of people do,” insisted Ethel Brown.
“But they are not right,” returned her aunt.
“Drawing room seems a very formal name for it,” Helen said. “Of course we’re used to it, because Grandmother Emerson always calls her parlor a drawing room, but she has a huge, big room, so my idea of a drawing room is always something immense.”
“Perhaps it is rather old-fashioned and stately,” admitted Mrs. Smith; “but the drawing room is simply a place where the family withdraws to sit together and talk together, and it need not be any more formal than the people who use it. But I protest that my drawing room or sitting room, or whatever it may be, shall not be called a living room, because it is not devoted to eating as well as sitting.”