Kitabı oku: «Paste Jewels», sayfa 4
AN OBJECT-LESSON
It was early in the autumn. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, with their two hopefuls, had returned from a month of rest at the mountains, and the question of school for Thaddeus junior came up.
“He is nearly six years old,” said Bessie, “and I think he is quite intelligent enough to go to school, don’t you?”
“Well, if you want my honest opinion,” Thaddeus answered, “I think he’s intelligent enough to go without school for another year at least. I don’t want a hot-house boy, and I have always been opposed to forcing these little minds that we are called upon by circumstances to direct. It seems to me that the thing for us to do is to hold them back, if anything. If Teddy goes to school now, he’ll be ready for college when he is twelve. He’ll be graduated at sixteen, and at twenty he’ll be practising law. At twenty-five he’ll be leader of the bar; and then—what will there be left for him to achieve at fifty? Absolutely nothing.”
Mrs. Perkins laughed. “You have great hopes for Teddy, haven’t you?”
“Certainly I have,” Thaddeus replied; “and why shouldn’t I? Doesn’t he combine all my good qualities plus yours? How can he be anything else than great?”
“I am afraid there’s a touch of vanity in you,” said Mrs. Perkins, with a smile. “That remark certainly indicates it.”
“No—it’s not vanity in me,” said Thaddeus. “It’s confidence in you. You’ve assured me so often of my perfection that I am beginning to believe in it; and as for your perfection, I’ve always believed in it. Hence, when I see Teddy combining your perfect qualities with my own, I regard him as a supernaturally promising person—that is, I do until he begins to show the influence of contact with the hired man, and uses language which he never got from you or from me.”
“Granting that he is great at twenty-five,” said Mrs. Perkins, after a few moments’ reflection, “is that such a horrible thing?”
“It isn’t for the parents of the successful youth, but for the successful youth himself it’s something awful,” returned Thaddeus, with a convincing shake of the head. “If no one ever lived beyond the age of thirty-five it wouldn’t be so bad, but think of living to be even so young as sixty, with a big reputation to sustain through more than half of that period! I wouldn’t want to have to sustain a big name for twenty-five years. Success entails conspicuousness, and conspicuousness makes error almost a crime. Put your mind on it for a moment. Think of Teddy here. How nervous it would make him in everything he undertook to feel that the eyes of the world were upon him. And take into consideration that other peculiarity of human nature which leads us all, you and me as well as every one else, to believe that the man who does not progress is going backward, that there is no such thing as standing still; then think of a man illustrious enough for seventy at twenty-five—at the limit of success, with all those years before him, and no progress possible! No, my dear. Don’t let’s talk of school for Teddy yet.”
“I am sure I don’t want to force him,” said Mrs. Perkins, “but it sometimes seems to me that he needs lessons in discipline. I can’t be following around after him all the time, and it seems to me some days that I do nothing but find fault with him. I don’t want him to think I’m a stern mother; and when he tells me, as he did yesterday, that he wishes I’d take a vacation for a month, I can’t blame him.”
“Did he tell you that?” asked Thaddeus, with a chuckle.
“Yes, he did,” replied Mrs. Perkins. “I’d kept him in a chair for an hour because he would tease Tommy, and when finally I let him go I told him that he was wearing me out with his naughtiness. About an hour later he came back and said, ‘You have an awful hard time bringin’ me up, don’t you?’ I said yes, and added that he might spare me the necessity of scolding him so often, to which he replied that he’d try, but thought it would be better if I’d take a vacation for a month. He hadn’t much hope for his own improvement.”
Thaddeus shook internally.
“He’s perfectly wild, too, at times,” Mrs. Perkins continued. “He wants to do such fearful things. I caught him sliding down the banisters yesterday head-foremost, and you know how he was at the Mountain House all summer long. Perfectly irrepressible.”
“That’s very true,” said Thaddeus. “I was speaking of it to the doctor up there, and asked him what he thought I’d better do.”
“And what did he say?” asked Mrs. Perkins.
“He stated his firm belief that there was nothing you or I could do to get him down to a basis, but thought Hagenbeck might accomplish something.”
“No doubt he thought that,” cried Bessie. “No doubt everybody thought that, but it wasn’t entirely Teddy’s fault. If there is anything in the world that is well calculated to demoralize an active-minded, able-bodied child, it is hotel life. Teddy was egged on to all sorts of indiscretions by everybody in the hotel, from the bell-boys up. If he’d stand on his head on the cashier’s desk, the cashier would laugh first, and then, to get rid of him, would suggest that he go into the dining-room and play with the headwaiter; and when he upset the contents of his bait-box in Mrs. Harkaway’s lap, she interfered when I scolded him, and said she liked it. What can you do when people talk that way?”
“Get him to upset his bait-box in her lap again,” said Thaddeus. “I think if he had been encouraged to do that as a regular thing, every morning for a week, she’d have changed her tune.”
“Well, it all goes to prove one thing,” said Mrs. Perkins, “and that is, Teddy needs more care than we can give him personally. We are too lenient. Whenever you start in to punish him it ends up with a game; when I do it, and he says something funny, as he always does, I have to laugh.”
“How about the ounce-of-prevention idea?” suggested Thaddeus. “We’ve let him go without a nurse for a year now—why can’t we employ a maid to look after him—not to boss him, but to keep an eye on him—to advise him, and, in case he declines to accept the advice, to communicate with us at once? All he needs is directed occupation. As he is at present, he directs his own occupation, with the result that the things he does are of an impossible sort.”
“That means another servant for me to manage,” sighed Mrs. Perkins.
“True; but a servant is easier to manage than Teddy. You can discharge a servant if she becomes impossible. We’ve got Teddy for keeps,” said Thaddeus.
“Very well—so be it,” said Mrs. Perkins. “You are right, I guess, about school. He ought not to be forced, and I’d be worried about him all the time he was away, anyhow.”
So it was decided that Teddy should have a nurse, and for a day or two the subject was dropped. Later on Mrs. Perkins reopened it.
“I’ve been thinking all day about Teddy’s nurse, Thaddeus,” she said, one evening after dinner. “I think it would be nice if we got him a French nurse. Then he could learn French without any forcing.”
“Good scheme,” said Thaddeus. “I approve of that. We might learn a little French from her ourselves, too.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Bessie and that point was decided. The new nurse was to be French, and the happy parents drew beatific visions of the ease with which they should some day cope with Parisian hotel-keepers and others in that longed-for period when they should find themselves able, financially, to visit the French capital.
But—
Ah! Those buts that come into our lives! Conjunctions they are called! Are they not rather terminals? Are they not the forerunners of chaos in the best-laid plans of mankind? If for every “but” that destroys our plan of action there were ready always some better-succeeding plan, then might their conjunctive force seem more potent; as life goes, however, unhappily, they are not always so provided, and the English “but” takes on its Gallic significance, which leads the Frenchman to define it as meaning “the end.”
There was an object-lesson in store for the Perkinses.
On the Sunday following the discussion with which this story opens, the Perkinses, always hospitable, though distinctly unsociable so far as the returning of visits went, received a visit from their friends the Bradleys. Ordinarily a visit from one’s town friends is no very great undertaking for a suburban host or hostess, but when the town friends have children from whom they are inseparable, and those children have nurses who, whithersoever the children go, go there also, such a visit takes on proportions the stupendousness of which I, being myself a suburban entertainer, would prefer not to discuss, fearing lest some of my friends with families, recalling these words, might consider my remarks of a personal nature. Let me be content with saying, therefore, that when the Bradleys, Mr. and Mrs., plus Master and Miss, plus Harriet, the English nurse, came to visit the Perkins homestead that Sunday, it was a momentous occasion for the host and hostess, and, furthermore, like many another momentous occasion, was far-reaching in its results.
In short, it provided the Perkins family with that object-lesson to which I have already alluded.
The Bradleys arrived on Sunday night, and as they came late little Harry Bradley and the still smaller Jennie Bradley were tired, and hence not at all responsive to the welcomes of the Perkinses, large or small. They were excessively reticent. When Mrs. Perkins, kneeling before Master Harry, asked him the wholly unnecessary question, “Why, is this Harry?” he refused wholly to reply; nor could the diminutive Jennie be induced to say anything but “Yumps” in response to a similar question put to her, “Yumps” being, it is to be presumed, a juvenilism for “Yes, ma’am.” Hence it was that the object-lesson did not begin to develop until breakfast on Sunday morning. The first step in the lesson was taken at that important meal, when Master Harry observed, in stentorian yet sweetly soprano tones:
“Hi wants a glarse o’ milk.”
To which his nurse, standing behind his chair to relieve the Perkinses’ maid of the necessity of looking after the Bradley hopefuls, replied:
“’Ush, ’Arry, ’ush! Wite till yer arsked.”
Mrs. Bradley nodded approval to Harriet, and observed quietly to Mrs. Perkins that Harriet was such a treasure; she kept the children so well in subjection.
The incident passed without making any impression upon the minds of any but Thaddeus junior, who, taking his cue from Harry, vociferously asserted that he, too, wished a glass of milk, and in such terms as made the assertion tantamount to an ultimatum.
Then Miss Jennie seemed to think it was her turn.
“Hi doan’t care fer stike. Hi wants chickin,” said she. “I’n’t there goin’ ter be no kikes?”
Mrs. Perkins laughed, though I strongly suspect that Thaddeus junior would have been sent from the table had he ventured to express a similar sentiment. Mrs. Bradley blushed; Bradley looked severe; Perkins had that expression which all parents have when other people’s children are involved, and which implies the thought, “If you were mine there’d be trouble; but since you are not mine, how cunning you are!” But Harriet, the nurse, met the problem. She said:
“Popper’s goin’ ter have stike, Jinnie; m’yby Mr. Perkins’ll give yer lots o’ gryvy. Hit i’n’t time fer the kikes.”
Perhaps I ought to say to those who have not studied dialect as “she is spoke” that the word m’yby is the Seven Dials idiom for maybe, itself more or less an Americanism, signifying “perhaps,” while “kikes” is a controvertible term for cakes.
After breakfast, as a matter of course, the senior members of both families attended divine service, then came dinner, and after dinner the usual matching of the children began. The hopefuls of Perkins were matched against the scions of Bradley. All four were brought down-stairs and into the parental presence in the library.
“Your Harry is a fine fellow, Mrs. Bradley,” said Thaddeus.
“Yes, we think Harry is a very nice boy,” returned Mrs. Bradley, with a fond glance at the youth.
“Wot djer si about me, mar?” asked Harry.
“Nothing, dear,” replied Mrs. Bradley, raising her eyebrows reprovingly.
“Yes, yer did, too,” retorted Harry. “Yer said as ’ow hi were a good boy.”
“Well, ’e i’n’t, then,” interjected Jennie. “’E’s a bloomin’ mean un. ’E took a knoife an’ cut open me doll.”
“’Ush, Jinnie, ’ush!” put in the nurse. “Don’t yer tell tiles on ’Arry. ’E didn’t mean ter ’urt yer doll. ’Twas a haxident.”
“No, ’twasn’t a haxident,” said Jennie. “’E done it a-purpice.”
“Well, wot if hi did?” retorted Harry. “Didn’t yer pull the tile off me rockin’-’orse?”
“Well, never mind,” said Bradley, seeing how strained things were getting. “Don’t quarrel about it now. It’s all done and gone, and I dare say you were both a little to blame.”
“’Hi war’n’t!” said Harry, and then the subject was dropped. The children romped in and out through the library and halls for some time, and the Bradleys and Perkinses compared notes on various points of interest to both. After a while they again reverted to the subject of their children.
“Does Harry go to school?” asked Bessie.
“No, we think he’s too young yet,” returned Mrs. Bradley. “He learns a little of something every day from Harriet, who is really a very superior girl. She is a good servant. She hasn’t been in this country very long, and is English to the core, as you’ve probably noticed, not only in her way of comporting herself, but in her accent.”
“Yes, I’ve observed it,” said Bessie. “What does she teach him?”
“Oh, she tells him stories that are more or less instructive, and she reads to him. She’s taught him one or two pretty little songs—ballads, you know—too. Harry has a sweet little voice. Harry, dear, won’t you sing that song about Mrs. Henry Hawkins for mamma?”
“Don’t warn’ter,” said Harry. “Hi’m sick o’ that bloomin’ old song.”
“Seems to me I’ve heard it,” said Thaddeus. “As I remember it, Harry, it was very pretty.”
“It is,” said Bradley. “It’s the one you mean—‘Oh, ’Lizer! dear ’Lizer! Mrs. ’Ennery ’Awkins.’ Harry sings it well, too; but I say, Thad, you ought to hear the nurse sing it. It’s great.”
“I should think it might be.”
“She has the accent down fine, you know.”
“Sort of born to it, eh?”
“Yes; you can’t cultivate that accent and get it just right.”
“I’ll do ‘Dear Old Dutch’ for yer,” suggested Harry. “Hi likes thet better ’n ‘Mrs. ’Awkins.’”
So Harry deserted “Mrs. ’Awkins” and sang that other pathetic coster-ballad, “Dear Old Dutch,” and, to the credit of Harriet, the nurse, it must be said that he was marvellously well instructed. It could not have been done better had the small vocalist been the own son of a London coster-monger instead of the scion of an American family of refinement.
Thus the day passed. Jennie proved herself quite as proficient in the dialect of Seven Dials as was Harry, or even Harriet, and when she consented to stand on a chair and recite a few nursery rhymes, there was not an unnoticed “h” that she did not, sooner or later, pick up and attach to some other word to which it was not related, as she went along.
In short, as far as their speech was concerned, thanks to association with Harriet, Jennie and Harry were as perfect little cockneys as ever ignored an aspirate.
The visit of the Bradleys, like all other things, came to an end, and Bessie, Thaddeus, and the children were once more left to themselves. Teddy junior, it was observed, after his day with Harry, developed a slight tendency to misplace the letter “h” in his conversation, but it was soon corrected, and things ran smoothly as of yore. Only—the Only being the natural sequence of the But referred to some time since—Mr. and Mrs. Perkins changed their minds about the French nurse, and it came about in this way:
“Thaddeus,” said Bessie, after the Bradleys had departed, “what is the tile of a rockin’-’orse?”
“I don’t know. Why?” asked Thaddeus.
“Why, don’t you remember,” she said, “young Harry Bradley accused Jennie of pulling out the tile of his rockin’-’orse?”
“Oh yes! Ha, ha!” laughed Thaddeus. “So she did. I know now. Tile is cockney for tail.”
“Did you notice the accent those children had?”
“Yes.”
“All got from the nurse, too?”
“True.”
“Ah, Teddy, what do you think of our getting a French maid, after all? Don’t you think that we’d run a great risk?”
“Of what?”
“Of having Ted speak—er—cockney French.”
“H’m—yes. Very likely,” said Thaddeus. “I’d thought of that myself, and, I guess, perhaps we’d better stick to Irish.”
“So do I. We can correct any tendency to a brogue, don’t you think?”
“Certainly,” said Thaddeus. “Or, if we couldn’t, it wouldn’t be fatal to the boy’s prospects. It might even help him if he—”
“Help him? If what?”
“If he ever went into polities,” said Perkins.
And that was the object-lesson which a kindly fate gave to the Perkinses in time to prevent their engaging a French maid for the children.
As to its value as a lesson, as to the value of its results, those who are familiar with French as spoken by nurse-instructed youths can best judge.
I am not unduly familiar with that or any other kind of French, but I have ideas in the matter.
THE CHRISTMAS GIFTS OF THADDEUS
That you may thoroughly comprehend how it happened that on last Christmas Day Thaddeus meted out gifts of value so unprecedented to the domestics of what he has come to call his “menagerie”—the term menage having seemed to him totally inadequate to express the state of affairs in his household—I must go back to the beginning of last autumn, and narrate a few of the incidents that took place between that period and the season of Peace on Earth and Good-will to Men. Should I not do so there would be many, I doubt not, who would deem Thaddeus’s course unjustifiable, especially when we are all agreed that Christmas Day should be for all sorts and conditions of men the gladdest, happiest day of all the year.
Thaddeus and Bessie and the little Thad had returned to their attractive home after an absence of two months in a section of the Adirondacks whither the march of civilization had not carried such comforts as gas, good beds, and other luxuries, to which the little family had become so accustomed that real camp-life, with its beds of balsam, lights of tallow, and “fried coffee,” possessed no charms for them. They were all renewed in spirit and quite ready to embark once more upon the troubled seas of house-keeping; and, as they saw it on that first night at home, their crew was a most excellent one. The cook rose almost to the exalted level of a chef in the estimation of Thaddeus as course upon course, to the number of seven, each made up of some delicacy of the season, came to the table and received the indorsement which comes from total consumption. They were well served, too, these courses; and the two heads of the family, when Mary, the waitress, would enter the butler’s pantry, leaving them alone and unobserved, nodded their satisfaction to each other across the snow-white cloth, and by means of certain well-established signals, such as shaking their own hands and winking the left eye simultaneously, with an almost vicious jerk of the head, silently congratulated themselves upon the prospects of a peaceful future in a domestic sense.
“That was just the best dinner I have had in centuries,” said Thaddeus, as they adjourned to the library after the meal was over. “The broiled chicken was so good, Bess, that for a moment I wished I were a bachelor again, so that I could have it all; and after I got over my first feeling of hesitation over the oysters, and realized that it was September with an R—belated, it is true, but still there—and ate six of them, I think I could have gone down-stairs and given cook a diamond ring with seven solitaires in it and a receipted bill for a seal-skin sacque. I don’t see how we ever could have thought of discharging her last June, do you?”
“It was a good dinner,” said Bessie, discreetly ignoring the allusion to their intentions in June; for she had a well-defined recollection that at that time Bridget had given signs of emotional insanity every time she was asked to prepare a five-o’clock breakfast for Thaddeus and his friends, to the number of six, who had acquired the habit of going off on little shooting trips every Saturday, making the home of Thaddeus their headquarters over Sunday, when the game the huntsmen had bagged the day before had to be plucked, cleaned, and cooked by her own hands for dinner. “And it was nicely selected, too,” she added. “I sometimes think that I’ll let Bridget do the ordering at the market.”
“H’m! Well,” said Thaddeus, shaking his head dubiously, “I haven’t a doubt that Bridget could do it, and would be very glad to do it; but I don’t believe in setting a cook up in business.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that I haven’t any doubt that Bridget would in a very short time become a highly successful produce-broker with bull tendencies. The chicken market would be buoyant, and the quotations on the Stock Exchange of, say, B., S., and P.-U.-C.—otherwise, Beef, Succotash, and Picked-Up-Codfish—would rise to the highest point in years. Why, my dear, by Christmas-time cook would have our surplus in her own pocket-book; and in the place of the customary five oranges and an apple she would receive from the butcher a Christmas-card in the shape of a check of massive, if not graceful, proportions. No, Bess, I think the old way is the best.”
“Perhaps it is. By-the-way, John has kept the grounds looking well, hasn’t he? The lawn doesn’t seem to have a weed on it,” said Bessie, walking to the window and gazing out at the soft velvety sward in the glow of twilight.
“Yes, it looks pretty well; but there’s a small heap of stuff over there near the fence which rather inclines me to believe that the weeds have been pulled out within the last few days—in fact, since you wrote to announce our return. John is an energetic man in an emergency, and I haven’t a doubt he has been here at least once a week ever since we left. I’ll keep a record of John this fall.”
And so the two contented home-comers talked happily along, and when they closed their eyes in sleep that night they were, upon the whole, very well satisfied with life.
Weeks elapsed, and with them some of the air-castles collapsed. Whether custom staled the infinite variety of the cook’s virtues, and age withered the efficiency of Mary, the waitress, or whether something was really and radically wrong with the girls, Thaddeus and Bessie could not make out. Certain it was, however, that by slow degrees the satisfaction for which that first dinner seemed to stand as guarantor wore away, and dissatisfaction entered the household. Mary developed a fondness for church at most inconvenient hours—hours at which in fact, neither Thaddeus nor Bessie had ever supposed church could be. That it was eternal they both knew, but they had always supposed there were intermissions. Then the cook’s family, which had hitherto been moderately healthful, began to show signs of invalidism, though no such calamity as actual dissolution ever set its devastating step within the charmed circle of her relatives. Cousins fell ill whom she alone could comfort; nephews developed maladies for which she alone could care; and, according to Thaddeus’s record, John had been compelled on penalty of a fine to attend the funerals of some twenty-four deceased intimate friends in less than two months, although the newspapers contained no mention of the existence of a possible epidemic in the Celtic quarter. It is true that John showed a more pronounced desire to make his absence less inconvenient to his employer than did Mary and the cook, by providing a substitute when the Ancient Order of Funereal Hibernians compelled him to desert the post of duty; but Thaddeus declared the “remedy worse than the disease,” for the reason that John’s substitute—his own brother-in-law—was a weaver by trade, whose baskets the public did not appreciate, and whose manner of cutting grass in the early fall and of tending furnace later on was atrocious.
“If I could hire that man in summer,” Thaddeus remarked one night when John’s substitute had “fixed” the furnace so that the library resembled a cold-storage room, “I think we could make this house an arctic paradise. He seems to have a genius for taking warmth by the neck and shaking enough degrees of heat out of it to turn a conflagration into an iceberg. I think I’ll tell the Fire Commissioners about him.”
“He can’t compare with John,” was Bessie’s answer to this.
“No. I think that’s why John sends him here when he is off riding in carriages in honor of his deceased chums. By the side of Dennis, John is a jewel.”
“John is very faithful with the furnace,” said Bessie. “He never lets it go down. Why, day before yesterday I turned off every register in the house, and even then had to open all the windows to keep from suffocating.”
“But that wasn’t all John, my dear,” said Thaddeus. “The Weather Bureau had something to do with it. It was a warm day for this season of the year, anyhow. If John could combine the two businesses of selling coal and feeding furnaces, I think he would become a millionaire. And, by-the-way, I think you ought to speak to him, Bess, about the windows. Since you gave him the work of window-cleaning to do, it is evident that he thinks I have nothing to say in the matter, for he persistently ignores my requests that he clean them in squares as they are made, and not rub up a little circle in the middle, so that they look like blocks of opalescent glass with plate-glass bulls’-eyes let into the centre. Look at them now.”
“Dennis did that. John had to go to Mount Vernon with his militia company to-day.”
“Dennis is well named, for his name is—But never mind. I’ll credit John with his twelfth day off in four weeks.”
From John to Bridget, in the matter of days off, was an easy step, though such was Bessie’s consummate diplomacy that Thaddeus would probably have continued in ignorance of the extent to which Bridget absented herself had they not both taken occasion one day to visit some relatives in Philadelphia, and on their return home at night found no dinner awaiting them.
“What’s the matter now?” asked Thaddeus, a little crossly, perhaps, for visiting relatives in Philadelphia irritated him—possibly because he and they did not agree in politics, and their assumption that Thaddeus’s party was entirely made up of the ignorant and self-seeking was galling to him. “Why isn’t dinner ready?”
“Mary says that an hour after we left cook got a telegram from New York saying that her brother was dying, and she had to go right off.”
“I thought that brother was dying last week?”
“No; that was her mother’s brother, he got well. This is another person entirely.”
“Naturally,” snapped Thaddeus. “But next time we get a cook let’s have one whose relatives are all dead, or in the old country, where they can’t be reached. I’m tired of this business.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be cross with me about it, Thad,” said Bessie, with a teary look in her eyes. “I have to put up with a great deal more of it than you have, only you never know of it. Why, I’ve cooked one-half of my own luncheons in the last month.”
“And the dinners, too, I’ll wager,” growled Thaddeus.
“No; she’s always got home for dinner heretofore.”
“Well, we’ll keep a record-book for her, too, then. And we’ll be generous with her. We’ll allow her just as I was allowed in college—twenty-five per cent. in cuts. If she has twenty-five and a fifth per cent. she goes.”
“I don’t think I understand,” said Bessie.
“Well, we’ll put it this way: There are thirty days in a month. That means ninety meals a month. If she cooks sixty-seven and a half of them she can stay; if she fails to cook the other twenty-two and a half she can stay; but woe be unto her if she slips up by even so little as a millionth part of the sixty-eighth!”
“I don’t see how you can manage the half part of it.”
“We’ll leave that to her,” said Thaddeus, firmly; “and, what is more, we’ll put John and Mary on the same basis, and Dennis we won’t have on any basis at all. A man who will take advantage of his brother’s absence at a wake to black the shoes of that brother’s only employer with stove-polish is not the kind of a man I want to have around.”
“It will be a very good plan,” said Bessie, “for all except Mary. Her absences she cannot well avoid. She has to go to church.”
“How many times a week does she have to go?” queried Thaddeus.
“She is required to go to confession.”
“Well, let her reform, and then she’ll have nothing to go to confession for. I don’t believe that’s where she goes, either. I notice that one-half those evenings she takes off, permitting me to mind the front door, and enabling us both to acquire proficiency in the art of helping ourselves at dinner, there’s a fireman’s ball or a policeman’s hop or a letter-carriers’ theatre party going on somewhere in the county, and it’s my belief the worshipping she does on these occasions is at the shrine of Terpsichore or that of Melpomene, which is a heathen custom and not to be tolerated here. If she’s so fond of living in church we can quote to her Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia—‘Get thee to a nunnery!’ Why, Bess, I was mortified to death the other night when Bradley dined here, he’s all the time bragging about his menagerie, and I tried to bluff him out and make him believe we were waited on by angels in disguise, and you know what happened. He came, saw, and I was regularly knocked out. You let us in; we waited on ourselves; cook had prepared the seven-o’clock dinner at five to give her a chance to go to the hospital to see her brother-in-law with the measles; John had one of his Central-African fires on, and Bradley’s laughing about it yet.”
