There were very few people about the Bellevue House. They took a walk around the grounds and through the building, and stood looking at the city, covered with its workaday smoke from the many manufactories, till it almost seemed as if it were seen through a cloud.
"How strange it is," said Miriam, as they entered the street-car at the top of the hill, "to see the houses just as close together here, and to have it seem like a city of itself, and yet so different from the business part of Cincinnati below that it is hard to imagine the two are any part of each other!"
"There is something strange about such things," said Miss Benton. "It is just like people's lives. Their daily business, which brings them bread and butter, and which is really the largest and most important part of existence, seems to sink into insignificance or to be forgotten altogether when social relations are taken up. But, after all, I like to live in the city itself, where there is something of the past lingering about. Everything seems so new here."
"I don't know," said Ernestine. "I think I would like to live up here; the air seems so much purer. But I would want a bigger yard than these, where I might have a garden."
"It's cleaner, too, up here," said practical Gretta, who was neatness itself. "I visit my aunt on Vine Street Hill, and things always looks so much nicer and newer at her house than the same ones at ours. And it isn't because we don't try, for we do twice the amount of work; my mother and sister are always going about with a duster." And Gretta, who had made a long speech for her, finished with a sigh, at which they all laughed.
"Gretta would like a house where everything had a glass cover," said Miriam. "As for me, I like things jolly and comfortable, and if they get grimy and sooty, and nobody's to blame, what's the use of making one's self unhappy about it? I'm afraid I'm a good deal like Josie Thompson, for I do like to enjoy myself."
"Well, no two of us are alike, and I don't think it was intended that we should be," said Miss Benton. "That is what makes the charm of people's houses—that they should all partake of the individuality of their owners. When I enter even a little girl's room, I like to see some signs of her ownership there, and not have it all as her mother or older sister or the maid arranged it. I like to see something that looks as if she had an object in life, if it is nothing more than a charm string of buttons, (which, by the way, has gone out of fashion, I believe,) or a scrapbook."
"Well, then, Aunt Kitty," said Winnifred, smiling at her own thought, "it must be a treat for you to go into Uncle Fred's room; for, if I were to see such a room at the North Pole, I would think of him."
"Well," said Miss Benton, with a smile, "I might enjoy it better if it were in some other house. I think, in this case, it must be that familiarity breeds contempt. The fact is, girls, my brother's room is more of an old curiosity shop than a modern sleeping-room. He has always had a sort of magpie-habit of storing things away, and is continually having some new hobby; and as his hobbies are often changed, and each hobby is apt to take the form of making some sort of collection, he has queer things lying about. But from the time he was quite a little boy, mother always said, 'Oh, let him have that,' or 'do the other, and he'll be satisfied at home.'"
"How many canes and walking-sticks has he, Aunt Kitty?"