FullReads

Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough when a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished house, where the articles are not too expensive to be reasonably renewed as time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a cataract of splendid furniture is heaped upon her care,–when splendid crystals cut into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and moth and rust stand ever ready to devour and sully in every room and passageway.

Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all the mothers and aunts,–she was warned of moths, warned of cockroaches, warned of flies, warned of dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers, made of cold Holland linen, in which they looked like bodies laid out,–even the curtain tassels had each its little shroud,–and bundles of receipts, and of rites and ceremonies necessary for the preservation and purification and care of all these articles, were stuffed into the poor girl’s head, before guiltless of cares as the feathers that floated above it.

Poor Bill found very soon that his house and furniture were to be kept at such an ideal point of perfection that he needed another house to live in,–for, poor fellow, he found the difference between having a house and a home. It was only a year or two after that my wife and I started our menage on very different principles, and Bill would often drop in upon us, wistfully lingering in the cosy armchair between my writing-table and my wife’s sofa, and saying with a sigh how confoundedly pleasant things looked there,–so pleasant to have a bright, open fire, and geraniums and roses and birds, and all that sort of thing, and to dare to stretch out one’s legs and move without thinking what one was going to hit. “Sophie is a good girl!” he would say, “and wants to have everything right, but you see they won’t let her. They’ve loaded her with so many things that have to be kept in lavender that the poor girl is actually getting thin and losing her health; and then, you see, there’s Aunt Zeruah, she mounts guard at our house, and keeps up such strict police regulations that a fellow can’t do a thing. The parlors are splendid, but so lonesome and dismal!–not a ray of sunshine, in fact not a ray of light, except when a visitor is calling, and then they open a crack. They’re afraid of flies, and yet, dear knows, they keep every looking-glass and picture-frame muffled to its throat from March to December. I’d like, for curiosity, to see what a fly would do in our parlors!”

“Well,” said I, “can’t you have some little family sitting-room where you can make yourselves cosy?”

“Not a bit of it. Sophie and Aunt Zeruah have fixed their throne up in our bedroom, and there they sit all day long, except at calling-hours, and then Sophie dresses herself and comes down. Aunt Zeruah insists upon it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I’ll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,–not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being in sight; the piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour before I can get at anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah is standing tiptoe at the door, ready to whip everything back and lock up again. A fellow can’t be social, or take any comfort in showing his books and pictures that way. Then there’s our great, light dining-room, with its sunny south windows,–Aunt Zeruah got us out of that early in April, because she said the flies would speck the frescoes and get into the china-closet, and we have been eating in a little dingy den, with a window looking out on a back alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says that now the dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is such a care off Sophie’s mind that I ought to be willing to eat down cellar to the end of the chapter. Now, you see, Chris, my position is a delicate one, because Sophie’s folks all agree that, if there is anything in creation that is ignorant and dreadful and mustn’t be allowed his way anywhere, it’s ‘a man.’ Why, you’d think, to hear Aunt Zeruah talk, that we were all like bulls in a china-shop, ready to toss and tear and rend, if we are not kept down cellar and chained; and she worries Sophie, and Sophie’s mother comes in and worries, and if I try to get anything done differently Sophie cries, and says she don’t know what to do, and so I give it up. Now, if I want to ask a few of our set in sociably to dinner, I can’t have them where we eat down cellar,–oh, that would never do! Aunt Zeruah and Sophie’s mother and the whole family would think the family honor was forever ruined and undone. We mustn’t ask them unless we open the dining-room, and have out all the best china, and get the silver home from the bank; and if we do that, Aunt Zeruah doesn’t sleep for a week beforehand, getting ready for it, and for a week after, getting things put away; and then she tells me that, in Sophie’s delicate state, it really is abominable for me to increase her cares, and so I invite fellows to dine with me at Delmonico’s, and then Sophie cries, and Sophie’s mother says it doesn’t look respectable for a family man to be dining at public places; but, hang it, a fellow wants a home somewhere!”