Standard Household-Effect Company | Page 7

hadn't had such light
hearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europe
indefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of our
lives forever. Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every one
had been a pang. All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again."
"I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associations
pretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage. But the
things that we have in daily use?"
"It is exactly the same with them. Why should they be more to us than
the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no

particular pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly
not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the
anxiety she feels for them. She is really much more precious, if she
could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps
up with moth-balls. The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a piece
of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for
years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet
not form the slightest attachment to the furniture. Why should we have
tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not
with a thing we have hired?"
"I confess, I don't know. And do you really think we could liberate
ourselves from our belongings if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't the
eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking
them out for winter?"
"At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it
would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease. When the
Standard Household-Effect Company came down on the
temporal-manly with a penalty for violation of the lease, the
eternal-womanly would see the folly of her ways and stop; for the
eternal-womanly is essentially economical, whatever we say about the
dressmaker's bills; and the very futilities of putting away and taking out,
that she now wears herself to a thread with, are founded in the instinct
of saving."
"But," I asked, "wouldn't our household belongings lose a good deal of
character if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't our domestic interiors
become dreadfully impersonal?"
"How many houses now have character-personality? Most people let
the different dealers choose for them, as it is. Why not let the Standard
Household-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am sure that either
would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in
the few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves. In most
interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are
the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where
they are the result of design, they are worse. I see what you mean by
character and personality in them. You mean the sort of madness that
let itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and
has since gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the

eternal-womanly was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for
decoration and a gift for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and
each began to stamp herself upon our interiors. One painted a
high-shouldered stone bottle with a stork and stood it at the right corner
of the mantel on a scarf; another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left
corner, and tied the scarf through its handle. One knotted a ribbon
around the arm of a chair; another knotted it around the leg. In a day, an
hour, a moment, the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless,
springless; and the sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the
fireplace, in slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius.
The walls became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and
dignified ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned
themselves to a hysterical chaos, full of character. Some people had
their doors painted black, and the daughter or mother of the house then
decorated them with morning-glories. I saw such a door in a house I
looked at the other day, thinking I might hire it. The sight of that black
door and its morning- glories made me wish to turn aside and live with
the cattle, as Walt Whitman says. No, the less we try to get personality
and character into our household effects the more beautiful and
interesting they will be. As soon as we put the Standard
Household-Effect Company in possession and render it a relentless
monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect and decorator in each of
our