We were in the dining-room.

"This nice room!"

"It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know."

Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained
floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,--the new, pretty
drugget,--the freshly clad, broad old sofa,--the high wainscoted
walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,--the
ceiling faintly tinted with buff,--the buff holland shades to the
windows,--the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with
its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a
gleam of silver and glass,--the two or three pretty engravings in the
few spaces for them,--O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a
kitchen.

But Ruth began again.

"You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down
stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and
everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never
was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It
would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we _might_ bring the
kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen."

"But the stove," said mother.

"I think," said Barbara, boldly, "that a cooking-stove, all polished
up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!"