Eleanor was the girl at Ninety-three. She and May were intimate friends, or considered themselves such. Intimacy is a word very freely used among young people who have not learned what a sacred word it is and how very much it means. They had grown up together, had gone to the same schools, shared most of their pleasures as well as their lessons, sent each other Christmas presents and birthday cards every year, and consulted in advance over their clothes, spring bonnets, and fancy work, which, taken all together, may be said to make an intimacy according to the general use of the term. So it was natural that, when May, stirred by the sense of young-ladyhood just at hand and by the modern impulse for house decoration, desired to "do over" and beautify her room, Eleanor should desire it also.
Making a room pretty nowadays would seem easy enough where there is plenty of money for the purpose. There is only the embarrassment of choice, though that is so embarrassing at times as to lead one to envy those grandmothers of ours, who, with only three or four patterns of everything to choose from, and those all ugly, had but the simple task of selecting the least ugly! But in the case of my two girls there was this further complication, that very little money could be used for adornment of the bedrooms. Mrs. Blodgett and Mrs. Pyne had consulted over the matter, and the decision was that Eleanor and May might each spend twenty dollars, and no more.
What can be done with twenty dollars? It will buy one pretty article of furniture. It will pay for a "Kensington Art Square," with perhaps enough left for cheese-cloth curtains. It will paper a room, or paint it. You can easily dispose of the whole of it, if you will, in a single portière. And here were two rooms which needed renovation from floor to ceiling!
The rooms were of the same size. Both had two windows looking north and an ample closet. The most important difference lay in the fact that the builder of the houses, for some reason known only to himself, had put a small fireplace across the corner of Eleanor's room, and had put none in May's. Per contra May's room was papered, which she considered a counterbalancing advantage; but as the paper was not very pretty, Eleanor did not agree with her.
Many were the consultations held between the two girls. And just here, before they had actually begun operations, a piece of good luck befell both of them. Eleanor's grandmother presented her with an easy-chair, an old one, very shabby as to cover, but a good chair still, and very comfortable. And almost simultaneously a happily timed accident occurred to Mrs. Blodgett's spare-room carpet, which made the buying of a new one necessary, and the old one was given to May. It was a still respectable Brussels, with rather a large medallion figure on a green ground. It did not comport very well with the blue and drab paper on the walls, and the medallions looked very big on the smaller floor; but May cared nothing for that, and she accepted her windfall gleefully.
"It will save ever and ever so much," she said, joyously. "Carpets do cost so. Poor Eleanor, you will have to get one for yourself, unless you can persuade your cook to upset an oil lamp on one of your mother's."
"Oh, Annie is too careful; she could never be persuaded to do such a thing as that," laughed Eleanor. "Besides, I don't want her to. I don't like any of mother's carpets very much."
"Well, I don't care what sort of a carpet it is so long as I don't have to buy it," said May.
"I do," replied Eleanor.
She did. There was this great point of difference between the friends. Eleanor possessed by nature that eye for color and sense of effects which belongs to what people call the "artistic" temperament. May had none of this, and did not even understand what it meant. To her all reds and olives and yellows were alike; differences of tone, inflections of tint, were lost on her untrained and unappreciative vision. She was unconscious of this deficiency, so it did not annoy her, and as Eleanor had a quiet and pleasant way of differing with her, they never quarrelled. But none the less did each hold to her own point of view and her own opinion.