"If it was anyways damp or chilly, Mis' Emmons always had a little blaze in the grate—not a heat blaze, but just a Come-here blaze. And going into her little what-she-called living-room at night, I always thought was like pushing open some door of the dark to find a sort of cubby-corner hollowed out from the bigger dark for tending the homey fire. That rainy night we went in from the street almost right onto the hearth. And it was as pleasant as taking the first mouthful of something.
"Insley, with Christopher still on his back, stood on the rug in front of the door and looked round him.
"'How jolly it always looks here, Mrs. Emmons,' he says. 'I never saw such a hearty place.'
"I donno whether you've ever noticed the difference in the way women bustle around? Most nice women do bustle when something comes up that needs it. Some does it light and lifty, like fairies going around on missions; and some does it kind of crackling and nervous, like goblins on business. Mis' Emmons was the first kind, and it was real contagious. You caught it yourself and begun pulling chairs around and seeing to windows and sort of settling away down deep into the minute. She begun doing that way now, seeing to the fire and the lamp-shade and the sofa, and wanting everybody to be dry and comfortable, instant.
"'You are so good-natured to like my room,' she says. 'I furnished it for ten cents—yes, not much more. The whole effect is just colour,' she says. 'What I have to do without in quality I go and wheedle out of the spectrum. What should we do without the rainbow? And what in the world am I going to put on that child?'
"Insley let Christopher down on the rug by the door, and there he stood, dripping, patient, holding his paper bag, and not looking up and around him, same as a child will in a strange room, but just looking hard at the nice, red, warm blaze. Miss Sidney come and stooped over him, with that same little way of touching him, like loving.
"'Let's go and be dry now,' she says, 'and then let's see what we can find in the pantry.'
"The little fellow, he just laughed out, soft and delicious, with his head turned away and without saying anything.
"'I never said such a successful thing,' says Miss Sidney, and led him upstairs where we could hear Mis' Emmons bustling around cosey.