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Page 61
"Have you selected a lot?"
"What for?"
"For a new house."
"Bless you, my dear husband, I wouldn't build another house, still less
live in it, for all the wealth of the treasury vaults. Isn't this our
own? Hasn't it always been perfectly suited to our wants? What upon
earth are you thinking of?"
"Oh, nothing in particular. I never think if I can help it. I have
heard that a man ought always to build two houses, one to learn how,
the second to correct the mistakes of the first. I thought perhaps it
was the same way with women."
"This house was exactly right when it was built, it could not have been
improved, but that was ten years ago, and a great many things have
happened in the last ten years; but, then, a great many more will
happen in the next ten, and ten years hence there will be just as many
things to change in the houses that are built this year as there are
now in those that are of the same age as ours."
"But how would you change this house if it could be done by a magic
wand or by the exercise of faith, and without raising a speck of dust
or upsetting the housekeeping affairs for a single minute?"
"I would make it larger for one thing. Our rooms are too small. The
number of rooms a house contains should depend on the number of people
there are to live in it, including all the children, the guests and the
servants, with a certain allowance for contingencies."
"Depending on the hospitality of the family."
"Yes; and whatever the number of rooms, they should be large enough,
not merely to hold the occupants when the doors are shut, but for
comfortable living and moving about. There is nothing in which all men
and women are more conservative than in the planning of their houses;
there seems to be something hereditary about it, as difficult to change
as a tendency to bald heads and awkward locomotion. Americans are
special sufferers in this respect. The primitive Anglo-American home
was only a step removed from the wigwams of the aboriginal savages, in
size, shape and general accommodations. Even our English ancestors,
from whom we derived some of our domestic notions, were not accustomed
to anything magnificent in the way of dwellings. The climate was
against them, and they were not sufficiently luxurious in their tastes.
Their houses were primarily places for shelter and refuge. In summer
they lived out of doors, and in winter they crept into close quarters
and waited for warm weather. With plenty of land and building materials
to be had for the taking, our colonial grandfathers should have had the
most generous homes in the world."
"Yes; and to judge by some of the old colonial mansions which have
escaped the 'making-over' vandals we have been going backwards in that
respect during the last fifty or a hundred years."
"Yes; and we ought to have been going the other way, for the size of
rooms should increase as the cost of furniture diminishes. Take for
instance, a parlor or sitting room fifteen feet square, which is, I
believe, about the orthodox size for a modern house. Give such a room a
dozen straight-backed and straight-legged chairs ranged along the
sides, a table in the center of the room with a green cover and four
books on it, two or three unhappy-looking family portraits on the
walls, a pair of brass candlesticks on the high, wooden mantel, a pair
of bellows, a shovel and tongs, with, perhaps, in the way of luxury, a
haircloth sofa. Now compare the room furnished in that way, which was
by no means uncommon in the days of our grandfathers with a room of the
same size, in which are stored half a dozen chairs, no two alike, and
some of them as large as small lounges, a center table piled with books
and magazines and photographs, till like a heap of jack straws, it is
impossible to remove one without disturbing the whole pile; a lounge
with a back, a divan or something without a back, an upright piano, two
or three bookcases, several small stools and piles of Turkish cushions
to catch the unwary, huge Japanese vases beside the fireplace, a
leopard skin with a solid head in front of the table, and a sprinkling
of Persian rugs spilt over the floor; a cabinet of bric-a-brac in the
northeast corner, a 'whatnot' with a big jardiniere bearing a
three-foot palm on the top story in the northwest, a carved bracket
with a sheaf of Florida grasses in the southeast, and a tall wooden
clock that won't go in the southwest; a brass tea kettle hanging from a
wrought iron frame beside a fragile stand that carries a half dozen of
still more fragile 'hand-painted' teacups and saucers; lambrequins and
heavy curtains at all the windows and most of the doors, a big
combination gas and electric chandelier suspended from the center of
the ceiling, bedangled with jumping jacks, Christmas cards, straw
ornaments and other artistic 'curious'; one or two small tables
scattered 'promiscous like' about the room; a music stand and a banjo;
with photographs, chromos, oil paintings, water colors and etchings,
from one to three feet square, in gilt, enameled and wooden frames of
all styles and degrees of fitness on the walls of the room,--take a
room furnished in this way or a great deal more so, and compare it
with another of the same actual dimensions furnished in the
old-fashioned way and see which is the larger. The modern furnishing
may be 'cozy,' oppressively cozy when there are half a dozen people
trying to move gracefully around and between it without upsetting or
destroying anything, but what sort of hospitality can we offer our
guests if they must be always afraid of breaking something valuable if
they stir?"
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