Cooks -- Fiction; Household employees -- Fiction; Housekeeping -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
All I could reply was: "No." I should like to have been pungent and
clever, but somehow or other, I never can follow Letitia. She generally
appeals to me with a deft query, destined to color her own delightful
train of thought, and I have nothing better to say than "no"--or
occasionally "yes."
After that, Aunt Julia dropped the "servant question," as she called it.
The "servant question"! As though there could be such a question! How
could refined and educated people elect to permit the mere matter of
domestic drudgery to be a "question"? Art might be a question. Science
was certainly a question. But to allude to the handmaiden, who opens
your front door, or to the person who Marylands your terrapin, as a
"question" was too ludicrous. It was making mountains out of molehills.
Ah! Letitia and I were for the glorious mountains, with their sun-kissed
peaks and their exultant elevation.
We were neither of us freighted with that detestable thing dubbed a
"sense of humor." Thank goodness for that! A sense of humor is a
handicap in the world's race. People afflicted with it seem to spend
their time laughing at their friends, scoffing at serious situations,
and extracting spurious merriment from the gravity and dignity of life.
We both believed that a sense of humor was unrefined. Comic
story-tellers, comic poets, comic critics--how we loathed them! They
were parasites on the face of things, giving you stones when you craved
bread--furnishing nasty, sickly ridicule in lieu of delicate,
intellectual analysis. Thank goodness, that both Letitia and I had been
spared the curse of a "sense of humor." We had been educated beyond it.
Aunt Julia, as I said, was henceforth silent--or comparatively
silent--on her banal, squalid "servant question." But she was rampant
and interfering again when we selected the pretty little apartment--in a
beautiful neighborhood--that was to be our home--Letitia's and mine! We
took it without a question, there being nothing that we wanted to know.
It was not one of those American institutions in which, to get from the
drawing-room to the dining-room, you were forced to walk through the
bedrooms, no matter who happened to be in them, asleep, or dressing. It
had a "private hall," and each room possessed a window. Why each room
shouldn't possess a window, I can't explain, but windows in up-to-date
apartments are a luxury, and not a necessity. I dare say that they are
very old-fashioned, but they are one of the last remnants of old fashion
to which I cling.
It was a small apartment with "six rooms and bath"--very cozy, and quite
light and cheerful without furniture. After we had seen our dainty
"belongings" moved in, we were bound to admit that some people might say
that it all looked "stuffy." Letitia didn't think so; nor did I. Much we
cared!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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