.

In her own tiny closet she brought about a really magnificent
improvement. This took place mainly on Decoration Day, a day which, just
because of its name, Johnnie regarded as particularly suitable for the
happy task in hand. Cis's ceiling and walls had never been papered (she
explained this by pointing out that paper would only have made the
little cubby-hole just that much smaller, and there was not even a mite
of room to spare). By dint of extra violet-making, she bought a can of
paint and a brush. Then borrowing a ladder from the janitress, she first
cleared her bedroom of its contents, and next wiped every inch of
plaster--sides and top--by means of a rag tied over the end of the
broom. After that, in her oldest dress, with her head wrapped up, she
tinted her retreat, the mop-boards included, a delicate blue.

Now, however, she was far from done. The paint dry, she restored her two
pieces of furniture to their rightful places. The dressing-table box she
skirted with cheesecloth dipped in blued starch; and covered the top of
it with a roll of crinkly, flower-sprinkled tissue paper. To the general
effect, her cretonne-encased pillow gave the final touch. It was
Johnnie's opinion that the pillow was one of the most beautiful things
in New York. When it was stood up stiffly against the wall at the end of
the narrow bed shelf; when the picture of Colonel Roosevelt was again in
its place of honor beside the bit of mirror, with the handsome Edwarda
leaned negligently just beneath; and when Cis had lavished upon her bed
and box the delicious scent of a whole nickel's-worth of orris root,
Johnnie, wildly enthused, signaled the flat above.

"I'll bet there ain't any room that's nicer'n this in the whole Waldorf
'Storia!" he vowed to the little Jewish lady when she came rocking down
to marvel over the transformation, hands uplifted, head wagging. "Don't
you think it's fine, Mrs. Kukor? and don't it smell 'zac'ly like Mrs.
Reisenberger?"

"Pos-i-tivvle!" agreed Mrs. Kukor.

Next, in her housewifely zeal, Cis started in to improve the kitchen.
Keeping the ladder an extra day by special permission she climbed it to
wash the eight small panes of the window, after which she hung at either
side of them a strip of the blue-tinted cheesecloth. But when Barber saw
the curtains, he called them "tomfoolery," and tore them down. So
nothing happened to the rest of the flat.

That rebuke of Barber's seemed to deflect Cis's interes