So I had an eye to Jenny’s education in my article which I unfolded and read, and which was entitled,
There are many women who know how to keep a house, but there are but few that know how to keep a _home_. To keep a house may seem a complicated affair, but it is a thing that may be learned; it lies in the region of the material, in the region of weight, measure, color, and the positive forces of life. To keep a home lies not merely in the sphere of all these, but it takes in the intellectual, the social, the spiritual, the immortal.
Here the hickory-stick broke in two, and the two brands fell controversially out and apart on the hearth, scattering the ashes and coals, and calling for Jenny and the hearth-brush. Your wood-fire has this foible, that it needs something to be done to it every five minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of our bright-faced genius are like the piquant sallies of a clever friend,—they do not strike us as unreasonable.
When Jenny had laid down her brush, she said,—
“Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics.”
“Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms,” said I, with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition. “Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation.”
“There papa goes with subjective and objective!” said Marianne. “For my part, I never can remember which is which.”
“I remember,” said Jenny; “it’s what our old nurse used to call internal and _out_-ternal,—I always remember by that.”
“Come, my dears,” said my wife, “let your father read”; so I went on as follows:—
I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill Carberry, to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed into “that undiscovered country” of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn our apprehensions.
“I’ll tell you what, Chris,” he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, “do you know what I chose this house for? Because it’s a social-looking house. Look there, now,” he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors,—“look at those long south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and out like a sunbeam. I’m getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things we’ll have there! the nicest times,—everything free and easy, you know,—just what I’ve always wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go. And here now’s the library,—fancy this full of books and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just as you please and ask no questions,—all the same as if it were your own, you know.”