I looked at Letitia. A slight expression of disgust manifested itself on her face, although she tried for my sake to conceal it.
"It is a word that has come to us, Archie, from the old French garbe," she said quickly, with her own admirable tact. "It was once more disgusting than it now seems to be. Americans use it to express kitchen refuse or anything of that sort. Of course, our cook will have no refuse, for we shall get a good one. Probably, in low, unrefined households they do have refuse. It is possibly quite general—for average people do not understand the refinement of living. Aunt Julia meant nothing, I am sure."
Letitia, the sweetest and most diplomatic girl I have ever met, rose and kissed Aunt Julia, and I was bound to feel mollified. Not that Aunt Julia was in the least upset by my dignity. In fact, she was convulsed with laughter, but it was the same sort of laughter that I prefer to call a snortch, or a sniffth.
"If you ever eat oranges," she persisted in continuing, "what are you going to do with the peel? And your potato skins? And your melon rinds? And your old bones? And your tin cans? And your grocery boxes? That is what we unrefined people call garbage. But I dare say that you and Letitia will put it all in your drawing-room and make a cozy corner of it, or tie it up with blue ribbons. You silly children!" she cried, drying the laughter from her eyes, "if you weren't so amusing I could be angry with you."
Letitia looked at me. I looked at Letitia. She put her index finger to her lips to signify silence. It dawned upon us both that Aunt Julia—poor old thing—was cursed with the terrible commodity known as the "sense of humor." That is the way it always manifests itself. It is irrelevant laughter at serious subjects. My opinion is that it is a disease, and that a remedy for it will be found one day. They seem to be discovering that remedy in the comic papers, which no longer, I have heard, appeal to the afflicted.
Letitia went on reading De Amicitia; I renewed my acquaintance with Goethe, and Aunt Julia fell asleep with a book in her hands. I couldn't help seeing that it was called Hints to Housewives. Certainly Letitia's only relative was a bit disenchanting.
[CHAPTER II]
It was while we were honeymooning at Niagara, that Aunt Julia, in a letter dated from her home, at Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson, wrote to tell us that she had secured a cook for us, a colored woman, who had been highly recommended, and whom we should find awaiting us when we took possession of our cunning little domicile.