"So do I!" "And I!" came the chorus of surprised voices as the last door swung open and the beauties of the third chamber burst upon their view.
"It makes me think of fire-crackers," Cherry pensively observed.
"Nobody but Peace would ever have thought of such a thing," Faith put in.
"A regular Fourth of July room," stuttered the President when he had recovered his voice enough to speak. "Girlies, how did you do it?"
"Well," confessed Peace, meditatively chewing her finger in her endeavor to appear modest in the midst of such unstinted praise, "at first we didn't know what to do. The other girls kept talking about 'propriate colors for their complexions. Faith is all blunette and she looks best in pink. Hope is all blonde and blue is her best color, while Gail and Cherry have blunette hair and blonde eyes, and they chose yellow and green. I didn't know it then, but that is what they did. Anyway, they talked about the different colors till I thought we ought to have our rooms fixed up in things that fitted us. That made it hard for Allee and me, you see, 'cause she is all blonde and I'm all blunette. To fit her, the room would have to be all blue, and to fit me it would be all red. Gussie said it wasn't stylish to use red and blue together any more, so we didn't know what to do until one day when we were rummelging through the attic we found heaps and heaps of perfectly whole bunting and two great, big flags. That decided us to make a flag room of ours, and Gussie said it was a splen-did idea. So that's how it happened.
"Allee and me'd rather sleep together so's we can talk when we are awake, instead of having to holler our thoughts clear across the room from one bed to the other whenever we want to talk secrets; so we traded beds with Gussie. She said she was willing, and I always did want that bird of a bed after I saw it in her room. But the curtains wouldn't hang from its tail like I thought they would, and we—"
"Stole my Paris doll to hold 'em up with!" cried Cherry, spying for the first time the beautiful waxen image dressed to represent the Goddess of Liberty, which stood on a tiny mantel over the quaint little bed, and held the bunting curtains in one hand.
"We borrowed it," Peace corrected. "We couldn't very well ask you 'bout it without your teasing to know why, and Allee and me didn't have a decent doll among us. Besides, you never play with it any more, and like as not grandpa or some other person that's got money will give us one of our own for Christmas. Then you can have yours back again. I guess you can wait that long, can't you? We wanted the walls striped with red and white, but Gussie thought that would look too much like a barber shop, so we just had white paper. It doesn't much matter, for the flags cover most of that wall, and Martha and George—we found them in the attic—Washington take up all the space on that side under the eagle—we got that out of the glass case that stands in the barn loft. We were going to see if we couldn't find some rugs with flags in them, but Gussie said it wasn't nice to walk on our country's flag, so we chose this red carpet that used to be on this floor."
"But where did you get such cute, quaint furniture?" asked Faith who was trying the white enameled chairs one after another.
"Oh, that all came from the attic, too. Didn't cost us anything. It was a dull, ugly brown—"