Aunt Julia, however, was not particularly restful to the nerves overweeningly unstrung. Even while she was listening to our history she was bustling about, arranging things, and--of course!--dusting. She flicked dust from the piano, filched it from the ornaments, dug it from the tiger-head, blew it from the pictures, rubbed it from the chair-backs, fought it from the window-sills. And then--if any had remained--I am perfectly certain that she would have eaten it. Dust was Aunt Julia's weakness, as it is the weakness of many women. If dust had sex, it would assuredly be masculine, as the majority of women are so disgracefully attentive to it. They run after it so rudely. It is only the intellectual, large-minded women, who don't mind a little bit of harmless dust, and can sit still comfortably while it settles and enjoys itself. The others are always pottering around after it, making their own life, and that of their associates, unnecessarily miserable. Personally, dust has always seemed to me to be homelike and cozy, and I hate to see it flagged away and routed. "You see," said Aunt Julia triumphantly, as she lifted the clock from the mantel-piece, and revealed the huge space, surrounded entirely by thick dust, upon which it had stood, "you two children, who are always talking cooks, really need what we call a general. You want somebody who will dust as well as cook. Apparently, you have secured ladies who could do neither." "You engaged Anna Carter for us, aunt," remarked Letitia pointedly, and I could have applauded her gladly, if I had not been in my own house. The opportunities for being impolite are wonderfully curtailed nowadays. Etiquette says that you must be polite in your own house; you must be polite in other people's houses. Apparently, one can be impolite only out of doors. "And I particularly told her," said Aunt Julia emphatically, "that the main thing was to keep the place spick-and-span. I made more of a point of that than I did of the cooking. Healthy young people don't want a lot of messy '_à la_' dishes, but they do want immaculate living rooms." "Oh, Aunt Julia--" Letitia began argumentatively. "Oh, Aunt Julia!" mimicked the old lady. "Wait until you can afford to keep three or four servants before you put on so many airs. 'Oh, Aunt Julia!' Yes, and 'Oh, Aunt Julia' again! With your 'drawing-room' and your 'evening dress' and your menus you want a retinue of domestics. You think that all you have to do is to sit down and live artistically in the most inartistic and impossible city in the world. I say that, and I'm a good American, too. And there's no 'Oh, Aunt Julia!' about it, either."