blossoms were scattered in snowy whiteness up and down the valley.

Her little house was a cottage with a porch running across the
front where windows looked out from the sitting room and the front
bedroom. Back of these rooms were a dark little bathroom that
connected the front bedroom with another smaller bedroom, a little
dining room and a kitchen. Almost all the houses in Red Creek were
duplicates, except in minor particulars, of this house, but this
particular specimen was older than some of the others and showed
signs of hard usage. The kitchen floor was chipped and stained,
and the bathroom basin was plugged with putty; there were odd
bottles partly full of shoe polish and ink and vinegar, here and
there; and on the shelves of the triangular closet in the dining
room were cut and folded pieces of spotted white paper.

Martin, man-fashion, had merely camped in kitchen and bedroom
while awaiting his wife; but Cherry buttoned on her crisp little
apron on the first morning after her arrival, and attacked the
accumulated dishes in the sink, and the scattered shirts and
collars bravely. It was a cold, raw morning, and she went to and
fro briskly, burning rubbish in the airtight stove in the sitting
room, and keeping a good wood fire going in the kitchen, and
feeling housewifely and efficient as she did so.

After a lunch for which she was praised and applauded in something
of the old honeymoon way, she walked to market, passing blocks of
other little houses like her own, with bare dooryards where nipped
chrysanthemums dangled on poles, and where play wagons, puddles of
water, and picking chickens alternated regularly. Other marketing
women looked at Cherry with the quickly averted look that is only