Perior held the ladder and criticised. “They are quite out of place, you know. That exotic art is most incongruous. It jars.” Camelia was hanging up a modern print after Hiroshighé.
“It wouldn’t jar on us, would it?” she asked, driving in a nail.
“Let us train them to a more cosmopolitan out-look, then.”
“They would far prefer the colored prints from Christmas numbers.”
“Well, they shan’t have them!” Camelia declared, and he laughed at her determined tyranny. But when her tenants were duly installed Camelia was forced to own that the honest forces of the soil were difficult to manage. She came in to tea one afternoon with the announcement, that the Dawkins had taken down all their prints and put up flower-entwined texts and horrible colored advertisements. Mrs. Dawkins had said that her husband objected to “those outlandish women”; they made him feel “quite creepy like.”
Later on she had to confess that the Coles by no means appreciated their photographs of the Sistine Sibyls, so charmingly placed along the walls, and that from among them glared a well-fed maiden with upturned, prayerful, and heavily-lashed eyes; testifying to the Coles’ religious instincts and to their only timid opposition.
“How can they be so stupid!” cried Camelia. “And how can I!”
“You can’t grow roses on cabbages, Camelia,” said Perior, “to say nothing of orchids. You are demanding orchids of your cabbages.”
“Desire precedes function,” Camelia replied sententiously, “if the cabbages want to, very much, they may grow orchids. I shall still hope.”