PART II
LEARNING AND HELPING
LEARNING AND HELPING
"She was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favoured ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home."
—Hawthorne
ONE would like to take the person Hawthorne is describing on a camping party or a picnic. She would be equally agreeable to stay at home with, or to find at home when one came in. It is a sign that there is such a person in a house when the whole family have to know where "Mother" is, as soon as they get inside the front door. Sometimes it is a sister or an aunt, sometimes a father, who has to be found before one can settle down, but whatever the relationship, it is the person who makes us feel at home.
It is odd, is it not, the way we are always saying that we "feel at home," or "not at home," or "homesick," or that something is "homelike"? What do we mean by it, anyway? When people try to tell what home is, they usually make poor work of it. It is not in the least necessary to tell what it is; a home is a thing to have, not to talk about. All I want to say here is that homes are not houses and furniture, but people. There is an Indian proverb which says, "The hearth is not a stone but a woman." Fathers and brothers have their own share in making their homes, but mothers and daughters are more apt to take care of their homes and stay in them. So it has come to be that making homes is a special and particular work of women.
Whatever work a girl may hope to do in the future, she will live somewhere, and whatever that somewhere is like, it should be as homelike as she can make it. This is partly on account of a good many people she will find who need a little pleasantness and comfort given to them, and partly because she will not be comfortable and happy herself unless she has something homelike about her. This is why it is a great advantage to be a woman; what power we have to make homes, we carry with us. Hawthorne says that a woman, who is especially gifted in this way, can make a home of any place, even though she is there but a few hours—a hotel bedroom, for instance. The Indian proverb, however, goes even further. It says, not that a woman can make a home, but that she is a home. That is, we should have the power to make people feel at home wherever we are.