After this, during several weeks, my bedchamber became to me a place full of sweet dreams and rest and quiet breathing. Luxurious indifference, a pleasure in hearing the crickets in the grass of the midsummer gardens, and voices talking afar--a satisfaction in seeing the polished walnut, marble and china and plenteous linen towels of my washstand, my altar to Hebe, and in seeing through a window,
While day sank or mounted higher, The light, aërial gallery, golden railed, Burn like a fringe of fire
on some remote palace of the city. These and other sensations of malarial fever occupied me for a while. In half dreams I then enjoyed the minutest details of life in an old farm-house that had been my home, or walked through a picture-gallery I had once frequented, seeing each picture strangely perfect and splendidly limned. Light diet and keeping quiet--which every Westerner knows to be the cure of this fever--cured me. I came forth looking like a _swairth_, one of those words marked "obs." in the dictionary--means phantom of a person about to die. It ought to be revived; so here goes--_swairth_.
Leaden before, my eyes were dross of lead.
I was pale and lank, but things had settled themselves in my mind: I had gone back to my old ideas of honor and freedom; my mind was made up.
"Well, Lydia," said I, "you wanted to manage: you were bound to wear the breeches. As you make your pants, so you must sit in them."
"Indeed! Nothing would please me better," said she.
"I will sell our house and all that's in it, and get out of debt," said I.
"You mean to be one of the lower classes and wear old rags," she exclaimed.
"We have no class-distinctions but the Saving Class and the Wasting Class. I shall be of the first class. As to clothes, they are despicable," I replied.
"People who despise clothes can't get any."
"Well, I've done all I'm going to do toward developing the West, which consists in getting into debt, as far as I can see."
When an able woman submits she submits completely. Lydia put our house in order. I filled the streets with dodgers advertising our sale. I have not been a paragraphist for nothing: the sale was a success. I paid a part of my debts, and gave notes for the rest that will keep my future poor. I started in again on the _Times'_ city force. To board I hate: it's a chicken's life--roosting on a perch, coming down to eat and then going back to roost. So I got a little domicile in "The Patch." When the teakettle has begun to spend the evening the new cheap wallpaper, the whitewash and the soapsuds with which the floor has been scrubbed emit peculiar odors.