An orphan is sent to a New England aunt who takes her out of duty and puts her in the attic, and who has no defense whatever against a child taught to find something to be glad about in anything at all. Porter was a Boston-trained singer before she turned to fiction, and this book put a word into the dictionary that is now mostly used against it. The aunt, not the child, is the real subject. Fifty plates of children at quiet domestic tasks, from Mary Cassatt and Winslow Homer, run alongside a story about a girl who turns a bare attic into a place worth living in.
