now, as you talked with
them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental
chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins
and closets for all your worries and confidences.

But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every
woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I
only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it
weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago,"
complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood
floored, spacious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social,
aesthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as
clearly as if a sociologist had charted it.

* * * * *

Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the
crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a
junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon
portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each
of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink
cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the
labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a
soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes
behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster
household--had thought these massive atrocities the last word in
artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had
prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two
years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the
dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall.

Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with
them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel
and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the
entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks
as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a
nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping
porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in
the attic.

One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove.
Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples,
cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hos