“I had a stepmother,” said Miss Graham, “and I couldn’t have loved my own mother more tenderly, and I’m sure she loved Margaret’s mother and me quite as well as if we had been her own children. In fact, I think she was more careful of us than she was of her own children. She used to say we were a legacy to her and that she felt it her duty as well as her delight to be extra good to us, for our mother’s sake.”
Ethel Blue listened and smiled at the kind brown eyes that were smiling at her, but she shook her head as if she were unconvinced.
“At any rate you might select your closet to fit your stepmother,” Miss Daisy laughed, “and if you wanted to be very bad to a thin one, you could make her squeeze up small in one of the glass hat boxes, and a fat one would suffer most in this narrow closet of yours.”
They all laughed again and went on with the list of closets in the house.
“You noticed, I hope,” said Mrs. Smith, “that almost every closet in the house has an electric bulb inside that lights when you open the door and goes out again when the door is closed.”
“Splendid,” approved Miss Graham. “Is there one in your linen closet?”
“Yes, indeed. Did you notice that the linen closet is on the bedroom floor? There need be no carrying up and down stairs of heavy bed linen. The linen for the maid’s room, in the attic, is kept in a small linen closet up there, and the table linen belongs in a closet made especially for it in the dining room. It has many glass shelves quite close together, so that each table cloth may have a spot to itself and the centrepieces and doilies may be kept flat with nothing to rumple them.”
“I suppose the medicine closets will go into the bath-rooms when the other fittings are installed,” said Mrs. Morton.
“Yes,” returned her sister-in-law.
“Did you notice the pretty cedar shavings that the carpenters left on the floor of the cedar closet?” asked Dorothy. “They say they always leave the cedar shavings they made, because people like to put them among their clothes to make them fragrant.”