Talking to you in this way once a month, O my confidential reader, there
seems to be danger, as in all intervals of friendship, that we shall not
readily be able to take up our strain of conversation, just where we
left off. Suffer me, therefore, to remind you that the month past left
us seated at the fireside, just as we had finished reading of what a
home was, and how to make one.
The fire had burned low, and great, solid hickory coals were winking
dreamily at us from out their fluffy coats of white ashes,--just as if
some household sprite there were opening now one eye and then the other,
and looking in a sleepy, comfortable way at us.
The close of my piece, about the good house-mother, had seemed to tell
on my little audience. Marianne had nestled close to her mother, and
laid her head on her knee; and though Jennie sat up straight as a pin,
yet her ever-busy knitting was dropped in her lap, and I saw the glint
of a tear in her quick, sparkling eye,--yes, actually a little bright
bead fell upon her work; whereupon she started up actively, and declared
that the fire wanted just one more stick to make a blaze before bedtime;
and then there was such a raking among the coals, such an adjusting of
the andirons, such vigorous arrangement of the wood, and such a brisk
whisking of the hearth-brush, that it was evident Jennie had something
on her mind.
When all was done, she sat down again and looked straight into the
blaze, which went dancing and crackling up, casting glances and flecks
of light on our pictures and books, and making all the old, familiar
furniture seem full of life and motion.
"I think that's a good piece," she said, decisively. "I think those are
things that should be thought about."
Now Jennie was the youngest of our flock, and therefore, in a certain
way, regarded by my wife and me as perennially "the baby"; and these
little, old-fashioned, decisive ways of announcing her opinions seemed
so much a part of her nature, so peculiarly "Jennyish," as I used to
say, that my wife and I only exchanged amused glances over her head,
when they occurred.
In a general way, Jennie, standing in the full orb of her feminine
instincts like Diana in the moon, rather looked down on all masculine
views of women's matters as "_tolerabiles ineptiae_"; but towards her
papa she had gracious turns of being patronizing to the last degree; and
one of these turns was evidently at its flood-tide, as she proceeded to
say,--
"_I_ think papa is right,--that keeping house and having a home, and all
that, is a very serious thing, and that people go into it with very
little thought about it. I really think those things papa has been
saying there ought to be thought about."
"Papa," said Marianne, "I wish you would tell me exactly how _you_ would
spend that money you gave me for house-furnishing. I should like just
your views."
"Precisely," said Jennie, with eagerness; "because it is just as papa
says,--a sensible man, who has thought, and had experience, can't help
having some ideas, even about women's affairs, that are worth attending
to. I think so, decidedly."