“Advise me?” Gertrude exclaimed impatiently.  “What good would advice do?  It takes money to get up changes in evening dresses.”

“You poor little goose!” said Susan with a grave smile, “I suppose I was once just as foolish.  Well, here are twenty-five dollars you may have.  It is really all I can spare, for I mean to go at building my house immediately.”

“Susie, you’re a duck!” cried the delighted Gertrude, eagerly taking the bills.  “I can get along nicely with twenty-five dollars for this time, but, oh dear! the next time!”

But Susan did not heed her sister’s foreboding cry.  Getting pencil and paper, she was soon engaged in sketching the ground-floor of a cottage house.  It was to cost about twenty-six hundred dollars.  This was years before the day of high prices, when a very cozy house could be compassed for twenty-six hundred.

The following three weeks were very busy weeks for Susan, though all she did was to work at the plan of her house.  Her mother grumbled.  Brother Tom made his jokes, and Gertrude “feazed,” to use her own word.  The neighbors came and went, and still Susan continued to sit with drawing-tools at her desk, sketching plan after plan, and rejecting one after another.

“I declare, Susie,” said her sister, “I don’t believe Christopher Wren gave as much thought to the planning of St. Paul’s as you have to that cottage you’re going to build.  I believe in my heart you’ve made a thousand diagrams.”

“Well,” Susan retorted, “I don’t suppose anybody’s been hurt by them.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you had to clear up the library every morning as I have to.  Those sketches of yours are everywhere, lying around loose.  I have picked them up and picked them up, till they’ve tired me out.  ‘Parlor, dining-room, kitchen, pantry:’  I’ve read this and read it, till it runs in my head all day, like ’rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief.’  I’ve marked off the figures on all the papering in this house into ’parlor, dining-room, kitchen, pantry.”

“I don’t see a mite of reason in Susan’s being so particular about that house,” said the mother, “seein’ she’s going to rent it.  Now, if she was going to live in it herself, or any of the rest of the family, it would be different, Anyway, these plans all look to me like first-rate ones,” she continued, glancing from one to another of half a dozen under her spectacles—­“plenty good enough for renting-houses.  Now, this one is right pretty, ’pears to me, and right handy.—­What’s the reason this one won’t do, Susan?”

“Why, mother, don’t you see the fault?” Susan replied.  “There’s no way of getting to the dining-room except through the kitchen.”

“To be sure!” said the mother.  “Of course that would never do, for, of all things, I do despise to have folks stalking through my kitchen when the pots and kittles are all in a muss, as they’re always like to be at meal-times.  What ever did you draw it this way for, Susan?”