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 Jenny 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
Jenny 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 Jenny 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, Jenny, 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 ineptioe_; 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 Jenny 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."