Family life -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Saving and investment -- Fiction
When Mr. Fenelby went to the city in the morning he gave Kitty's
trunk checks to the expressman. When he returned to his home in the
evening he found Kitty and Mrs. Fenelby on the porch, and Mrs.
Fenelby was explaining to her visitor, for about the tenth time, the
workings of the Fenelby Domestic Tariff. She had explained to Kitty
how the tariff had come to be adopted, how it was to supply an
education fund for Bobberts--who was at that moment asleep in his
crib, upstairs--and how every necessity brought into the house had
to pay into Bobberts' bank ten per cent., and every luxury thirty
per cent. Kitty was a dear, as was Mrs. Fenelby, but they were as
different as cousins could well be, for while Mrs. Fenelby was the
man's ideal of a gentle domestic person, Kitty was the man's ideal
of a forceful, jolly girl, and as full of liveliness as a well
behaved young lady could be. She was properly interested in Bobberts
and admired him loudly, but in her heart she was not sorry that Mr.
Fenelby's brother Will was to be a visitor at the house during her
stay.
She did not show any unmaidenly curiosity in regard to Brother Will,
but between doses of Bobberts and Tariff she managed to learn about
all Mrs. Fenelby knew regarding Brother Will's past, present and
future, including a pretty minute description of his appearance,
habits and beliefs.
Brother Will had arrived that very day, and on the way up from the
station the Fenelbys had explained to him all about the Domestic
Tariff, and also that until a bed could be sent out from the city he
would have to find a bed wherever he could, and so it happened that
he went right back to the city with Mr. Fenelby, and had not met
Kitty, as he preferred to sleep in the city, rather than in the
hammock on the porch.
There is an admirable natural honesty in women that prevents them
from claiming that their husbands are perfection. In some this is so
abnormally developed that, to be on the safe side, I suppose, they
will not allow that their husbands have any virtues whatever; in
others the trace of this type of honesty is so slight that they will
claim to every one, except their dearest friends, that their
husbands are the best in the world. The normal wife first announces
that her husband is as near perfect as any man can be, and then
proceeds to enumerate all his imperfections, bad humors, and
annoying habits, under the impression, perhaps, that she is praising
him. Mrs. Fenelby had been proceeding in somewhat this way in her
conversation with Kitty, under the impression that she was showing
Kitty how lovely and domestically perfect was her life, but Kitty
gained from it only the impression that Mrs. Fenelby had become the
slave of Mr. Fenelby and Bobberts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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