“What are you going to do for ornaments,” asked another.

Helen laughed.

“James Hancock has an idea for decorating the walls so that they’ll interest the babies, and we’re going to have fresh cheese-cloth curtains at all the windows, but that’s the end of our possibilities.”

“I have several bureau scarves that are in good condition but they have been washed so many times that they’re a little faded.  If you’d like those—?” she ended with an upward inflection.

“We would,” replied Helen promptly.

“Could you use some prints of pictures—­good paintings?” inquired yet another, a person whose taste Helen knew could be trusted.

“We’d be glad of them.  We can frame them in passepartout.  We’d be especially glad of madonnas.”

“That’s just what I was going to offer you.  A club I once belonged to studied celebrated paintings of madonnas one winter and I made this collection.  Many of them are only penny prints and some are cut from magazines—­“.

“They’re perfectly good for us,” Helen reassured her, and made another note in her book.

Most of the visitors went home with the falling dark, but some stayed to see the rose lanterns lighted, and others, who had not been able to come in the afternoon, drove or walked out from town in the evening and were served with ice cream and strawberries from a supply that had been wonderfully well calculated.

“Let us have just a week to spend this money and to make up the sheets and pillow cases and curtains and you can tell Mr. Watkins to send out the women,” Helen announced triumphantly to Delia.

“I’m going to spend the week with Margaret so I can come over with her every day and help,” returned smiling Delia.

“Then we shan’t need a whole week.  When you go home to-night please ask your father to be making his selection—­four mothers with two children apiece.  You and Tom can escort them out on the Tuesday after Fourth of July.”

CHAPTER VI

FURNITURE MAKING

It did not take the women long to adjust themselves to life at Rose House, and as for the children, they loved it from the first.  It was a great international gathering that was sheltered on the old farm.  Mrs. Schuler was German; Moya, Irish.  Mrs. Peterson, a Swede, occupied the rooster room with her baby and her flaxen-haired daughter of three; Mrs. Paterno, an Italian, found good pasturage among the cows of the violet room for her black-eyed boys of two and four; Mrs. Tsanoff, a Bulgarian, told the Matron that her twin girl babies were too young to pay attention to the kittens on the curtains of the yellow room; while Mrs. Vereshchagin, a Russian, discovered that the puppies of the blue room were a great help to her in holding the attention of her boys of three and five when she was putting them to bed.

Mrs. Schuler shook her head doubtfully when she took down their names and nationalities in her notebook on the day of their arrival.