We squander our money on frippery--not in dress merely, but in hideous
ornaments for our fire-places, in antimacassars of disagreeably
suggestive name, in toys and trinkets and imitation rubbish of all
kinds, which encumber our table-surfaces, and are dust-traps occupying
the minds and mornings of our parlour-maids to keep them clean. We
spend in this taste-destroying trash the change of the twenty pounds
which would have bought one ornament of real beauty, which would only
take the same time to dust as one of the fifty frivolities costing from
half-a-crown to seven-and-sixpence each.
This is mostly so much waste, or worse, because it helps the habit of
foolish, ill-considered spending; and while we thus bedizen our
drawing-rooms, we render them so uninhabitable that they fall out of
use for our own comfort, and become merely show places for visitors.
A long article might be written on dusting. We can hardly have too
little of the carpet-broom (which all housemaids love to use every week
to the detriment of our carpets), and hardly too much of the
feather-brush for lightly touching curtains, walls, and pictures, or of
the duster for rubbing furniture. If a little is done daily, furniture
will never need polishing, but will always look bright, as dust will
not have entered the crevices.
It is easier, and also better for the durability of carpets, to take
them up occasionally to be beaten, and have the dusty floor beneath
them cleaned, than to have everything smothered weekly in the dust
raised by the carpet-broom. A pair of steps is necessary in a house
where cleanliness is attended to, to unhang curtains and pictures and
replace them after dusting. The walls need to be whisked over weekly
with the feather-brush.
The elegant china and glass gaseliers which are now so general are
easily cleaned with a damp sponge; those of Venetian glass are still
more beautiful, and not much more expensive: these also can be washed
with little trouble. Adopting the plan of cleaning one room each day,
it will not take a great deal of time, or cause much fatigue; while the
light daily dusting required is a mere nothing to any one doing it
dexterously.
I have a great dislike of chiffoniers; the very name presupposes them
receptacles of _chiffons_ and lumber. I cannot see any use for them in
a drawing-room. Music-books should be in the music-stand, a lady's work
in her work-table, and books either in use or put away in the
book-case.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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