"It naturally would," said Letitia, "because you see 'home' is really an Anglo-Saxon idea."
But we were going to have a home of our own in the very midst of seething New York. The mere notion of a vulgar, degrading "boarding-house" was detestable to us, while as for the "apartment hotel," where you sat at dinner in your best clothes with a crowd of unsympathetic strangers, we sniffed at the bare suggestion. We wanted a little refuge, tiny yet dainty, where we could be alone to live our lives. "To live our lives" was one of Letitia's expressions. She abstracted it unconsciously, I believe, from Ibsen. A chaste and cherishable resort, where of an evening my wife could read The Iliad in the original, and I, in a becoming smoking-jacket and velvet slippers, could work at my Lives of Great Men, was what we clamored to possess. And possess it we fully intended to do.
I may add that Letitia also believed in the "new thought." She was of the opinion that you could will anything you wanted. She doted on sitting still, and sending out telepathic waves from her cunning little brain, and I loved to look at her telepathing. She was at her prettiest.
Aunt Julia Dinsmore, Letitia's only relative, and a sedate old lady with drab ideas, mentioned something about the "servant question" as she listened to our domestic rhapsodies. She suggested to us that there must be some satisfactory reason to explain the lack of well-appointed homes in New York. Americans liked comfort just as well as other people, said she. Did we suppose that they were uncomfortable because they preferred discomfort? And again she referred to the "servant question."
The "servant question"! How we laughed! Letitia nudged me under the table and arched her eyebrows. She turned to Aunt Julia and quoted one of Shakespeare's most beautiful passages:
"How well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!"
It is one of the many charming things in As You Like It. Aunt Julia said that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Perhaps it hadn't. In fact, as I think it over now, I can't quite see its relevancy. Yet what mattered relevancy? It was a treat to listen to Letitia when she quoted.
"Your Shakespeare will die when your cook comes in," said Aunt Julia, and she laughed. People are so fond of laughing at their own epigrams. It is most irritating—just as though the utterance of this perverted form of philosophy were a relief.
"You dear silly old thing!" exclaimed Letitia to her aunt, "we shall not worry. We don't read the comic papers. Americans believe all the wretched jokes, dished up for them, to be founded on fact. Americans believe anything. They have no time to think for themselves. Have they, Archie?"