Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/60

40 and up the stairs straight into the splendid dangers of Rainbow Land!

I had no time for these splendours on my arrival, nor, fortunately for me, was I left long to the tortures of my shyness. At the end of the hall, facing me, was the wide flight of stairs leading to the upper stories, and on the first landing, at their turning just where a few more steps led beyond into the back-building dining-room, my Grandmother, in her white cap and purple ribbons, stood waiting. In my memory she and that landing are inseparable. Whenever the door bell rang, she was out there at the first sound, ready to say "Come right up, my dear!" to whichever one of her innumerable progeny it might be. To her right, filling an ample space in the windings of the back stairs, was the inexhaustible pantry which I knew, as well as she, we should presently visit together. Though there could not have been in Philadelphia or anywhere quite such another Grandmother, even if most Philadelphians feel precisely the same way about theirs, she was typical too, like the house and the street. She belonged to the generation of Philadelphia women who took to old age almost as soon as they were mothers, put on caps and large easy shoes, invented an elderly dress from which they never deviated for the rest of their lives, except to exchange cashmere for silk, the everyday cap for one of fine lace and wider ribbons, on occasions of ceremony, and who as promptly forgot the world outside of their