Stella moved into her five-roomed furnished apartment just before Christmas. She still possessed some of the old knack in copying department-store window effects. But it had been a long time since she had had “her eye out for that sort of thing.” With no one to guide her, and the matter of expense a constant argument for the cheaper article, her results were not successful. As Laurel gazed upon the slowly growing tawdriness of the apartment, the joy she thought she would feel in inviting the vague new friends her mother told her she would make in her new environment, once they got settled, began to fade.

The living-room was furnished in Mission of the Roycroft Style—big oak chairs with leather cushions; a rectangular couch, leather-cushioned also; a table that was strong enough to be used for a carpenter’s bench. And all in spite of the fact of a two-toned light-green, satin-finished wall-paper of the 1890 “parlor period,” and an ivory-tinted mantel, which, mongrel though it was, showed more strain of Adam than of Elbert Hubbard.

Stella put yellow-flowered cretonne at the windows. She told Laurel that she had seen a colored picture of a Mission room, in a magazine with yellow-flowered cretonne for hangings, and it was perfectly stunning! She knew where she could get some yellow-flowered cretonne for only ninety-eight cents a yard as effective as linen at six-fifty. But, the hangings did not make the room right. Laurel felt convinced at last that the room would never be right.

One afternoon, when her mother was out shopping, she tried to give it just a little of the same look that Mrs. Morrison gave her rooms. But it was hopeless. Afterward she wandered through the apartment gazing upon all its details with despairing eyes.

The kitchenette with its piled-up breakfast and dinner dishes, waiting for their nightly washing (Stella kept no maid, and she had her own way of keeping house), suggested to Laurel little of the hominess of Mrs. Morrison’s big roomy kitchen, basking in the afternoon warmth of a great black stove, the table spread with a bright red cloth, and a cheerful, broad-faced clock ticking lazily on the mantel.

The Boston apartment was very little like the “home all of our own” of Laurel’s dreams. There was no garden. There was no lawn. There was no front door with a knocker, and a single bell. The only difference, as far as Laurel could see, between an apartment and a hotel was that in an apartment you ate your meals in your own rooms instead of downstairs, and it wasn’t against the rules to use the gas for cooking.

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