At Home with the dines | Page 7

Angel looked sober when my whisper reached him. But he did not
commit himself. I eyed him anxiously.
"But to make up for that outlay, here is the way I have planned the rest
of the house. Let's have no drawing-room."
"No drawing-room? Then where will you receive guests?"
"The room will be there, and people may come into it and sit down, but
it will not be familiar ground to strangers. They will find themselves in
a cheerful room with soothing walls and comfortable chairs. There will
be books and magazines. It will not be a library, for quantities of
bookcases discourage the frivolous. It will have no gilt chairs, because
big men always want to sit in them. It will have no lace curtains,
because I hate them. The piano will be there and most of our
wedding-presents,--all which lend themselves to the decoration of a
room which will look as if people lived in it."
"If you put bric-à-brac in it people will call it a parlour in spite of you,"
said the Angel.
"Not at all. It will have one distinguishing feature which will
effectually prevent the discriminating from making that mistake. I
intend to make the clock on the mantel go. That will settle matters."
"Of course."
"This room will lack the stiffness of a drawing-room and so invite

conversation, yet will be sufficiently dignified to prevent familiarity. I
shall endeavour to invest it with an invitation which will practically say
to your college friends, 'You may smoke here, but you may not throw
ashes on the floor.' Do you see my point?"
The Angel looked thoughtful.
"I hope it will work," he said.
"We can but try it. I am doing this because I wish our friends to meet us
together, and I don't approve of this separating men and women,--the
women remaining alone to gossip while the men go away to smoke. It
is too narrowing on us and too broadening on you."
"I like it,--in theory,--but some men are chimneys. They don't know
how to smoke when ladies are present."
"They will soon learn!" I declared, stoutly. "I shall be so attentive to
their comfort, so ready with an ash-tray, so eager to offer them the last
cigar in the jar (if I think they have smoked enough) that they will
notice my slightest cough."
Aubrey waxed enthusiastic.
"An evening spent in that room will be 'An Education in Polite
Smoking,' won't it?"
"And," I went on, "then when we are rich and want a truly handsome
drawingroom we can furnish it in pink silk and cupids with a light heart,
for behold, we will simply move all this comfort I have described into a
library, and the wear on the furniture will redeem it from newness and
give it the proper air of age and use. There is nothing more vulgar to
my mind than a perfectly new library. It looks--well, you know!"
"It does," said the Angel, with conviction. "All of that!"
We discussed these theories in detail, made many corrections, and
finally went down to buy. But a handsome shop and money in my

pocket always excite me so that what little common sense I was born
with instantly departs, and I buy feverishly, mostly things I do not want
and could not use. So the Angel adopted a good, safe rule. When he
saw my eyes begin to glitter with a "I-must-have-that-or-die"
expression, he used to take me by the arm and say:
"Now shut your eyes, and I'll get you past this counter."
I have heard of many curious women who do not enjoy housekeeping. I
am free to confess that I do not understand why, unless they started out
in life with the conceited idea that to bend their wonderful brains upon
the silly problem of keeping a house clean and ordering dinners was
beneath women of their possibilities on club essays. I often wonder if
they attacked the proposition of housekeeping with the intention of
seeing how much fun there is in it, of how much pleasure could be got
out of making a home, not merely keeping house, and of feeding their
conceit with the fuel of a determination to keep house better than any
woman of their acquaintance. The simple but fascinating problem of
how to make each room a little prettier than it was last week, would
keep even an ingenious woman busy and interested in something worth
while, and those of us who are sensitive to impressions would be
spared the truly awful sight of certain incongruous rooms in handsome
houses. Oh, if you only knew what people say about you--you women
who "don't like to keep house!"
But I forgot. Most women have no sense of humour, and few husbands
take the