The Spenders | Page 9

strife.
The Bines what-not in the sitting-room was grimly orthodox in its
equipment. Here was an ancient box covered with shell-work, with a
wavy little mirror in its back; a tender motto worked with the hair of
the dead; a "Rock of Ages" in a glass case, with a garland of pink
chenille around the base; two dried pine cones brightly varnished; an
old daguerreotype in an ornamental case of hard rubber; a small old
album; two small China vases of the kind that came always in pairs,
standing on mats of crocheted worsted; three sea-shells; and the cup
and saucer that belonged to grandma, which no one must touch because
they'd been broken and were held together but weakly, owing to the
imperfections of home-made cement.
The new cabinet, haughty in its varnished elegance, with its Watteau
dames and courtiers, and perhaps the knowledge that it enjoys
widespread approval among the elect,--this is a different matter. In
every American home that is a home, to-day, it demands attention. The
visitor, after eyeing it with cautious side-glances, goes jauntily up to it,
affecting to have been stirred by the mere impulse of elegant idleness.
Under the affectedly careless scrutiny of the hostess he falls
dramatically into an attitude of awed entrancement. Reverently he
gazes upon the priceless bibelots within: the mother-of-pearl fan, half
open; the tiny cup and saucer of Sèvres on their brass easel; the
miniature Cupid and Psyche in marble; the Japanese wrestlers carved in
ivory; the ballet-dancer in bisque; the coral necklace; the souvenir
spoon from the Paris Exposition; the jade bracelet; and the silver
snuff-box that grandfather carried to the day of his death. If the gazing
visitor be a person of abandoned character he makes humourous
pretence that the householder has done wisely to turn a key upon these
treasures, against the ravishings of the overwhelmed and frenzied
connoisseur. He wears the look of one who is gnawed with envy, and
he heaves the sigh of despair.

But when he notes presently that he has ceased to be observed he
sneaks cheerfully to another part of the room.
The what-not is obsolete. The Empire cabinet is regnant. Yet, though
one is the lineal descendant of the other--its sophisticated
grandchild--they are hostile and irreconcilable.
Twenty years hence the cabinet will be proscribed and its contents
catalogued in those same terms of disparagement that the what-not
became long since too dead to incur. Both will then have attained the
state of honourable extinction now enjoyed by the dodo.
The what-not had curiously survived in the Bines home--survived unto
the coming of the princely cabinet--survived to give battle if it might.
Here, perhaps, may be found the symbolic clue to the strife's cause.
The sole non-combatant was Mrs. Bines, the widow. A neutral was this
good woman, and a well-wisher to each faction.
"I tell you it's all the same to me," she declared, "Montana City or Fifth
Avenue in New York. I guess I can do well enough in either place so
long as the rest of you are satisfied."
It had been all the same to Mrs. Bines for as many years as a woman of
fifty can remember. It was the lot of wives in her day and environment
early to learn the supreme wisdom of abolishing preferences. Riches
and poverty, ease and hardship, mountain and plain, town and
wilderness, they followed in no ascertainable sequence, and a
superiority of indifference to each was the only protection against hurts
from the unexpected.
This trained neutrality of Mrs. Bines served her finely now. She had no
leading to ally herself against her children in their wish to go East, nor
against Uncle Peter Bines in his stubborn effort to keep them West. She
folded her hands to wait on the others.
And the battle raged.

The old man, sole defender of the virtuous and stalwart West against an
East that he alleged to be effete and depraved, had now resorted to
sarcasm,--a thing that Mr. Carlyle thought was as good as the language
of the devil.
"And here, now, how about this dog-luncheon?" he continued, glancing
at a New York newspaper clutched accusingly in his hand. "It was give,
I see, by one of your Newport cronies. Now, that's healthy doin's fur a
two-fisted Christian, ain't it? I want to know. Shappyronging a select
company of lady and gentlemen dogs from soup to coffee; pressing a
little more of the dog-biscuit on this one, and seein' that the other don't
misplay its finger-bowl no way. How I would love to read of a Bines
standin' up, all in purty velvet pants, most likely, to receive at one of
them bow-wow functions;--functions, I believe, is the name of it?" he
ended in polite inquiry.
"There, there, Uncle Peter!" the