Then I told him about the house and he said, “It was not good enough.” He told me to remember I would have many calls from the ladies connected with the Administration; and I answered I did not want a house that lady callers might approve, but one suitable for a home for Robert and my children. This sentiment agreed with his natural, primitive ideas of wifehood, and he heartily approved my views, but still he would not hear of the cottage I had selected. Finally he admitted that its water supply was poor, and that the house itself had not a good name. “People who mind freets,” he continued, “talk about it being unlucky, and point out that every one that lives in it, comes to grief of some kind.” But he was willing to warrant that I was above noticing things of that kind.
“Indeed, Mr. Scot,” I answered, “you would lose your warranty. I notice them very much. The atmosphere of a house tells me plainly, what kind of people live in it.”
“Of an empty house?” he asked.
“There are very few empty houses,” I answered, “very few indeed. I knew of one on the busiest corner of a busy 204 street in Chicago. It looked empty. It looked dead. You felt sure neither mortals, nor the bodiless were in its vacant rooms.”
We continued this conversation until the lawyer appeared to remember with a shock, that we were talking of things startlingly foreign to a lawyer’s office, and he ended his next sentence with the information that he had the McArthur place to rent—“a clean, nice house in good company, and without an ugly past to reckon with. I will go with Robert,” he added, “and we will look it over together.”
Robert subsequently took the house. He said I could make any shelter look homelike, and though small, I also saw that it possessed some possibilities. It was a wood building of two stories. There was one large room into which we entered at once, a thing so English that it won my instant approval. It was well lighted by four large windows, and had a little stoop at the front door with a balcony above it. The roof of this room was unplastered, but the want was partly hidden by a ceiling of strong domestic. The walls were covered with the same material, and then papered. On one side there was a wide fireplace, and a door leading into a room beyond.
This room was smaller and no attempt had been made in it to hide the boarding and shingling, except that they had been whitewashed, and of course that decoration could be again applied. An unpainted stairway in this room led to two large rooms above, and a door opened into a yard containing the kitchen, and a small stable. Robert saw all the inconveniences in their unvarnished literalness. I saw them as picturesque irregularities to be accepted with the rest of their environment. Indeed when our trunks arrived, and I stood once more on my own hearth, I liked the idea of bringing a pretty home out of such apparently incongruous materials. I knew that I could do it. With great and repeated suffering I had bought this knowledge. I had paid the price. Good! What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves.
Mr. Robert Barr