"I used to have Jack, but I am married now to golf links and the club."
"I"ll take your bet," I said.
"You"ll lose," she laughed. "They are both too perfect to last."
"They are not!" I cried.
But when the door closed, I rapped on wood.
CHAPTER II
THEORIES
If there is anything more delightful than to furnish one"s first home, I have yet to discover it. Aubrey says that "moving in goes it one better," but his preference is based on the solid satisfaction he takes in putting in two shelves where one grew before and in providing towel-racks and closet-hooks wherever there is an inviting wall-s.p.a.ce for them.
But to me, even the list I made out and changed and figured on and priced before I made a single purchase was full of possibilities, and contained wild flutters of excitement on account of certain innovations I wished to try.
"Aubrey," I said one evening as the Angel sat reading Draper"s "Intellectual Development of Europe," "have you any pet theories?"
"What"s that? Pet theories about what?"
"Housekeeping."
"I don"t quite understand. I"ve never kept house, you know."
"I mean did your mother keep her house and buy her furniture and manage her servants to suit you, or exactly as you would do if you had been in her place?"
"Not in the least," said the Angel, laying down his book, all interest at once.
"Ah! I knew it! Then you _have_ theories! That"s what I wanted to bring out. Now I have theories, too. One is the rag-bag theory."
"The--?"
"The theory that every housewife must have a rag-bag. My mother had one because her mother did and _her_ mother because _hers_ did, and so on back to the English one who probably brought _her_ rag-bag across with her. Ours was made of bed-ticking, and had a draw-string in it and hung in the bathroom closet. Now if you ever tried to lift a heavy bag down from a hook and knew the bother of emptying it of neat little rolls of every sort of cloth from big rolls of cotton-batting to little bundles of silk patches and having to look through every one of them to find a sc.r.a.p of white taffeta to line a stock, then you know what a trial of temper the family rag-bag is."
"And you--" said the Angel, who is definite in his conclusions.
"_I_ mean to have a large drawer in a good light absolutely _sacrificed_, as some people would call it, to the sc.r.a.ps. When you want a rag or a bone or a hank of hair in our house, all you will have to do is to pull out an easy sliding drawer without opening a door that sticks, or crawling into a dark corner, or having to light a candle, or doing anything to ruffle your temper or your hair. A flood of brilliant sunlight or moonlight will pour into my rag-drawer, and a few pawings of your unoccupied hand will bring everything to the top.
Won"t that be joyful?"
Aubrey, who loves to fuss about repairs and is for ever wanting material, was so enchanted with the picture I drew that he longed to have a cut finger to bind up on the spot.
"Have you any more theories?" he asked, laying Draper on his knee without even marking his place.
"A few. Some are about buying furniture."
"We want everything good," said Aubrey, firmly.
"More than that. We want _some_ things beautiful. And some things _very_ expensive."
I thought I saw the bank-book give a nervous flop just here. But perhaps it was only Aubrey"s expression of countenance which changed.
"For instance, I want no chairs for show. Every spot intended to rest the human frame in our house shall bring a sigh of relief from the weary one who sinks into it. I have already started it by the couch I ordered last week for your study. I went to the man who takes orders and said: "Have you ever read "Trilby"?" And he said no, but his wife had when it was the rage about five years ago. I had brought a copy on purpose, so I read him that paragraph from the first chapter describing the studio. Here it is: "An immense divan spread itself in width and length and delightful thickness just beneath the big north window, the business window--a divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented Englishmen could all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once, without being in each other"s way, and very often did!" He smiled and said it made very agreeable reading, to which I replied that I wanted one made just like it."
"What did he say?"
"Well, of course he argued. He wanted to make it a normal size. He wanted to know the size of the doors it would have to go through, and I told him it was for an apartment. As soon as he knew that he wanted to make the lower part of cedar to store furs in for the winter. I said: "No, no! This is a luxury. There is to be nothing useful about it. I want the whole inside given up to springs!" He said, "Turkish?" and I said yes, and put in two sets of them. At that he began to catch the spirit of the thing and took an interest. We argued so over the size of it that finally I told him to send out and measure the elevator and the door and the room it was to go in and make it just as large as those s.p.a.ces would allow. So you"ll have a divan ten by six. I wanted it bigger, but I couldn"t have got it through any front door."
"Why, won"t it about fill that little room?" asked my husband, with a trace of anxiety in his tone.
"Only about half-way. There"s just room for a little table of books at one end of the divan, and I"m going to have a movable electric lamp with a ground-gla.s.s globe and a green shade to be good for the eyes.
Your pipe-rack will be on the wall over it. Then by squeezing a little there will be just room for my writing-chair,--you know the one with the desk on the arm and the little drawer for note-paper?"
Aubrey got up and came over to where I had my list, and Draper fell to the floor unnoticed.
"I never heard anything sound so comfortable," he said. The Angel is always appreciative, and, moreover, is never too absorbed or too tired to express it fluently. That"s one of the things which make it such a pleasure to plan his comfort.
"Doesn"t it sound winter evening-y and snowy outside?" I said.
"I can hear the wind howling," said the Angel. "What"s the next item?"
"Well, now we come to a theory. Of course I have had no more experience than you in buying furniture, but it stands to reason that some of the things we buy now will be with us at death. Some furniture stays by you like a murder. For instance, a dining-room table. I have known some very rich people in my life, Aubrey, but I have seldom seen any who grew rich gradually who had had the moral courage to discard a dining-room table if it were even decently good. Have you ever thought about that?"
"I can"t say that I have, but it is fraught with possibility. "The Ethics of Household Furniture" would make good reading."
"Well, haven"t you," I persisted, "in all seriousness, haven"t you seen some very handsome modern dining-rooms marred by a dinner-table too good to throw away, which you were convinced the family had begun housekeeping with?"
"Yes, I have!" cried Aubrey. "You are right, I have. I thought you were jesting at first."
"Well, I am, sort of half-way. But the sort of dinner-table I want to buy is no joke. It is one which will grace an apartment or a palace.
We can be proud of it even when we are rich. Yet it is not showy, or one which will be too screamingly prominent. It is of carved oak with the value all in the carving. It costs--" Here I whispered the price, for to us it was almost a crime to think of it.
The 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 quant.i.ties 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-a-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."