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lighting? Wouldn’t I be scared to tell you?”
    Christine leaned against the counter, grinning. “I could stand to deal with you if you wanted to ruin this kitchen but not if you both wanted to ruin this kitchen and were scared to admit it. See, it was a self-correcting situation. Why waste time?”
    â€œOkay,” said Meg. She took a deep breath and said with a pretense of great nervousness, “I like Charles Dickens, Bach, barbershop quartets, and lilacs. I hate houses that are painted orange, and I will not live down the road from an orange house and have to look at it every time I drive to town. If you paint any part of your pretty white house orange, I will have to move. Or, if I’ve gotten attached to this place, sneak over at night and change it back.”
    â€œHmm…” said Christine, hitching herself onto the countertop. “All right. I like Angela Thirkell novels, Chopin, and peonies. Big, blowzy peonies. If you put in one of those little black coachmen statues standing by the front walk holding a lantern, I will come over while you’re at the movies and smash it with a hammer.”
    Meg nodded. “This is going to work.”
    Christine lifted her mug in agreement. “You bet.” She slid down from the counter. “Let’s see the house.”
    â€œIf you like the kitchen, you’re going to like this,” said Meg, gesturing through the doorway into the dining room. “It’s got a, whatever-you-call-it, linoleum rug.”
    â€œIt does!” said her visitor. “I never saw it. Louise had carpeting everywhere.”
    She stooped and ran a hand over the floor, which was covered to within a foot of the walls by a sheet of pale green linoleum, interspersed and bordered with a floral design in blues, pinks, and darker green. “It’s not even in bad shape, probably because of the carpeting. It must be, what, sixty years old?”
    Meg shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s sure as heck not recent. Let’s keep going. Maybe there’s a Murphy bed somewhere.”
    There wasn’t. But the downstairs had, besides the dining and living rooms, two nicely proportioned bedrooms and a long, narrow bathroom with a wide, shallow medicine cabinet built in above the sink and what must have been the original cherry wainscoting. Several of the hexagonal mosaic tiles on the floor had disappeared, and the window was frozen in place. When the two women, shoving together, managed to raise it, it fell back down again with a crash. The stairs to the smaller second story were behind a door in the hallway. They creaked, and tattered paper in a pattern of immense camellias clung, in torn sections, to the walls. At the top of the stairs was a large attic. The air was stale and the several windows were smeared and dirty, but enough sunlight came in to produce shafts of dancing dust motes. Some boxes and cartons, presumably abandoned by a previous tenant, were stacked near the steps.
    â€œStorage space!” said Meg.
    They went back down the stairs and Meg closed the door at the bottom. It immediately swung open again a few inches. She shut it more firmly and turned the knob, which seemed to take care of the problem. Nearby was the door to the basement. She pulled it open and located a light switch on the stairway wall. Christine had to duck her head for the first few steps. The cellar was cramped, with a low ceiling and a huge heating system that took up most of the area. The walls were not straight up and down but curved like the walls of a cave. There were stacks of old newspapers, and piles of broken and unappealing household items. It smelled, however, exactly as Meg thought an old basement should.
    â€œWell,” said Christine, looking around. “At least that’s not a coal furnace, which I halfway expected.”
    â€œIt’s immense,” said Meg, “and a little scary. I hope it works.”
    They went back up to