though she found something shocking in what the little girl had just
said. Elizabeth Ann thought to herself that she spoke as though milk ran
out of a faucet, like water.

She was very fond of milk, and she made a very good breakfast as she sat
looking about the low-ceilinged room. It was unlike any room she had
ever seen.

It was, of course, the kitchen, and yet it didn't seem possible that the
same word could be applied to that room and the small, dark cubby-hole
which had been Grace's asthmatical kingdom. This room was very long and
narrow, and all along one side were windows with white, ruffled curtains
drawn back at the sides, and with small, shining panes of glass, through
which the sun poured a golden flood of light on a long shelf of potted
plants that took the place of a window-sill. The shelf was covered with
shining white oil-cloth, the pots were of clean reddish brown, the
sturdy, stocky plants of bright green with clear red-and-white flowers.
Elizabeth Ann's eyes wandered all over the kitchen from the low, white
ceiling to the clean, bare wooden floor, but they always came back to
those sunny windows. Once, back in the big brick school-building, as she
had sat drooping her thin shoulders over her desk, some sort of a
procession had gone by with a brass band playing a lively air. For some
queer reason, every time she now glanced at that sheet of sunlight and
the bright flowers she had a little of the same thrill which had
straightened her back and gone up and down her spine while the band was
playing. Possibly Aunt Frances was right, after all, and Elizabeth Ann
WAS a very impressionable child. I wonder, by the way, if anybody ever
saw a child who wasn't.

At one end, the end where Cousin Ann was ironing, stood the kitchen