American essays -- 19th century; Short stories, American
Trivial! Did you ever board out? Did you ever stand in the midst of
your gas-lighted, damask-curtained, velvet-chaired, _closetless_ hotel
(yes--_hotel_) apartments, with a six-cent ink-bottle between your
perplexed thumb and finger, taxing your brain, as it was never taxed
before, to discover an oasis where to deposit it, when not in use?
Trivial? Did you ever live for a series of years with your head in a
trunk? Did you ever see your ghost-like habiliments dangling day after
day from pegs in the wall? Did you ever turn away your disgusted eyes,
as the remorseless chambermaid whirled clouds of dust over their
unprotected fabrics? Did you ever, as you lay in bed of a morning,
exhaust your ingenuity in devising some means of relief? Did you ever,
exulting in your superior acumen, rush out, and purchase at your own
expense, a curtain to cover them? Did you ever jam off all your finger
nails trying to drive it up? (for what woman ever yet hit a nail on the
head?) Did you ever have that dusty curtain drop down on your
nicely-smoothed hair, nine times out of ten when you went to it for a
dress? Did you ever set fire to it with a candle, when in an abstracted
state of mind?
Trivial? Did you ever implore a white-aproned waiter, with tears in
your eyes, and twenty-five cents in your hand, to bring you an empty
cigar-box to keep your truant slippers in? Did you ever stifle with
closed windows, because if you threw them up, you would throw out your
books, which were piled on the window lodge? Were you ever startled in
the middle of the night, by the giving way of a solitary nail, on which
were hung a bag of buttons, a bag of hooks and eyes, a child’s satchel,
a child’s slate, a basket of oyster crackers, a bag of chess-men,
and--your hoops?
Trivial? Did you ever partially carry out the curse which was passed
on Eden’s tempter, the serpent, as, with a long-handled umbrella, you
explored, for some missing shoe, the unknown regions under the bed? Did
you ever sit on your best bonnet? Did you ever step into your husband’s
hat? Did you ever tear a zig-zag rent in your favorite dress, and find,
on looking for pieces of the same to mend it, that you had given them
away to your washwoman, with other uncounted needfuls, because you had
no place to keep them? Did you ever stand in dismay over your furs and
woolens in spring, and your muslins, grenadines, and bareges, in autumn?
Trivial? Ah!--you never witnessed the cold-blooded indifference with
which hotel-keepers, and landlords generally, shrug their shoulders, as
surveying your rooms, and taking a _coup d’œil_ of your feminine
effects, you pathetically exclaim, with dropped hands and
intonation--“No closets!”
A FEMININE VIEW OF NAPOLEON AS A HUSBAND.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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