"But I say I will approve. After all, it's your room. I don't have to live in it. You can have it blue and vermilion, if you want to!"
And Martha had sat there for a moment without saying a word, her eyes beginning to twinkle, her dimples all chuckling, just shining and beaming, all her pleasure intensified by her quietness. Then she had hugged Emily after that and had run up to her room straight away. And up and down she ran, hunting for scissors, for yardsticks, measuring, planning, 'phoning to carpenters, twinkling, utterly happy. It had been Emily's sense of her utter happiness that had enabled her to stifle her impulses to interfere.
Once things had got rather serious. The child wouldn't have a bed in the room. She wanted to turn it into a sitting room. And when Emily had pointed out that she didn't need a sitting room, Martha had hugged her and, warningly, "I told you we'd quarrel, mother!" Emily had given way, and Martha had gone on, working like a beaver. She had dyed, and she had shopped in Chicago; she had "jollied" painters whole mornings, and gone back to school in the end, leaving her mother sewing balls of silken high-brow carpet rags. Her very letters had been full of instructions about the room. And during her spring vacation the whole house seemed to be an orgy of renewal, so that Martha hadn't been far wrong when she said that her mother only endured her nowadays through gritted teeth. She had said it from her "studio" in the attic, where she was painting tables, for there alone could she be found that holiday. She had planned so well that in that fortnight she had almost completed her purposes, and she had hated leaving it to go back to college. And to that room she had flown home again, not eager, as she generally was, to go away for the summer. Not once had she mentioned the Rockies or Canada, or even Europe. And her heart was so absorbed in it that now, on awakening to raspberries and cream, she had to go and adjust that blind and study the way the light fell on the cerise—practically—rug.
And Emily looked around, and smiled cautiously. It had been the girl's idea to make the room "amusing." That was the adjective she had continually used of her plan. And certainly she had succeeded in inciting mirth at least in the elders who beheld it. To be sure, with the blind down, the darkly gleaming floor wasn't so bad after one had got used to it. The sand-colored walls were matched by woodwork with little green lines on it. And the rosy silken oval rugs and those black day beds—hateful objects, which kept the edges of the bedding always on the floor, piled by day with cushions like shrieking parrots—all this was almost laughable. She had told Martha firmly the beds ought to be side by side between the windows. But Martha ignored the suggestion. The bookshelves had absurd little cupboards at each end, which Martha opened to show her friends, and an electric stove on a little tray which you stood, so, on this little shelf which pulled out, so. She had gathered a primitive sort of crockery bowls from New York, which were called "just too quaint," and the coffee things from the Chicago Ghetto. Emily had almost protested against this miniature kitchen. Martha never would be making fudge up there, she was sure. But then she had got to thinking of Martha's outgrown playhouse under the willow. "I used to let her have dishes and everything out there," she remembered. And she had not only stifled her objections; she had come heartily to admire this adolescent playhouse.
For there, opening off this room, was the amazing dressing room Martha had made from that large closet where formerly clothes had hung drably. People in the town used to say that, for the sake of having daylight in that closet and preserving the symmetry of the outside of the house, Emily's aunt had torn out and built over that wall seven times. Now Emily had to take visitors up to see that closet, many and insistent visitors, for all Martha's chums were bringing their mothers enviously to show them "Martha's apartment." When she heard their exclamations, she would look at her daughter with that feeling which she experienced when the child, blowing her horn, adjusting her brakes, watching the traffic "cop," drove that panting great headstrong car so calmly, without hurrying one eyelash, through the tangle of vehicles of any city that might lie in her path. For Martha quietly had taken that long narrow closet and lined it on both mirrored sides with hanging wardrobes, and a great total and variety of cunningly planned shelves, shallow and deep drawers, great and small, pulling out on patent rollers; she had packed away a beautifully lighted dressing table, with a stool that pushed back into its own "ducky nook." She had painted all the drawers a dull gold on the inside, and a creamy yellow on the outside, and made them gold knobs and handles. The purple floor and the glow of the rug, less violent than those of the larger room, left her visitors quite mad with envy and surprise.
"It's just Martha all over!" one girl sighed, and Emily had pondered that. Was Martha then to be a lover of perfect places to stow away things? There had been plenty of drawers and closets in the house before, Emily had said to herself. And when she had seen the child's delight in that huge big topmost drawer, she had let her have a great pile of old soft pieced quilts to pack away in it, just as she had given her old hats years before for the games in the willow playhouse. Was that dressing closet "just Martha all over"? Was the child going to be an architect, as she had carelessly suggested once, or an "interior decorator," possibly? Perhaps she was yet going to be brilliant, and do many things as successfully as she had done this, so that Bob would yet be proud of her. Or perhaps she was going to be a furious housewife, delighting in a family of children. And Emily grew serious thinking of that. She had every reason to distrust too great interest in housekeeping. She would see that Martha never loved furniture more than children's ease of mind, never put order of a room before its usefulness. She did hope Martha wouldn't carry these things to excess, as her heredity might urge her to. Here the child hadn't got all the rugs for this room home from the woman who was making them, and she had already begun to talk about enlarging the garage. It disfigured the whole house, as it was, she had told her father. If she might be allowed to double the size of it, making room for two cars——
Then Bob had interrupted: "I'm not going to keep two cars!"
"But I'll have a car next year," she had suggested.
"You don't need a car!" Bob had asserted, hotly.
"Maybe I don't," Martha had answered, softly, infuriatingly, for her lazily lifted eyes had added, defiantly, "But I'm going to have one, anyway!"