V
Olive suffered my rhyming with the same composure with which she met the unpreluded passing of a maid of all work, or the ill-natured smoking of the furnace on the first day it was fired. She preferred philosophy to poetry, and borrowed Nietzsche from the branch library. She persuaded me that the ladies of the bungalows are all practical persons, and so far as I am concerned, Olive fixed the type. It had seemed to me, as I viewed her comings and goings at long range, that she commanded infinite leisure; and yet her hours were crowded with activities. I learned from her that cooks with diplomas are beyond the purses of most bungalow housekeepers; and as Olive’s brother’s digestive apparatus was most delicate she assumed the responsibility of composing cakes and pastries for his pleasure. With tea (and we indulged in much teaing) she gave me golden sponge-cake of her own making which could not have failed to delight the severest Olympian critic. Her sand tarts established a new standard for that most delectable item of the cook-book. She ironed with her own hands the baby’s more fragile frocks. Nor did such manual employments interfere in any way whatever with the delicacy of her touch upon the piano. She confided to me that she made a practice of reviewing French verbs at the ironing-board with a grammar propped before her. She belonged to a club which was studying Carlyle’s French Revolution, and she was secretary of a musical society—formed exclusively of the mistresses of bungalows, who had nobly resolved to devote the winter to the study of the works of John Sebastian Bach.
It gradually became clear that the romance of the American bungalow was reinforced and strengthened by a realism that was in itself romance, and I was immensely stimulated by this discovery. It was refreshing to find that there are, after all, no irreconcilable differences between a pie well made and a Chopin polonaise well played. Those who must quibble over the point may file a demurrer, if they so please, with the baby asleep in the perambulator on the nearest bungalow veranda, and the child, awaking, will overrule it with a puckered face and a cry that brings mama on the run with Carlyle in her hand.