"We shall never recover it!" they all laughed in chorus. "This child is making the old mistake! She thinks we belong to the people of the house! She thinks it is they who use us, instead of their belonging to us, and our using them!"
"As if we had not sheltered generation after generation of them," creaked the bed.
"As if we had not seen face after face change and grow wrinkled," smiled the Cupids, "while we keep our bloom and smoothness undiminished."
"As if only last week," said the steel tongs, "a young woman had not been dismissed for leaving a spot of rust on me."
So they went on, until really I could stand it no longer. It seemed to me so very unbecoming and treasonable in these possessions to speak in so sarcastic and disrespectful a way of their possessors, that at length, with a great effort, I sat up in bed and remonstrated.
"I cannot let you talk so," I said, in a voice trembling at once with indignation and awe. "You are forgetting yourselves altogether. You are nothing but Things, any of you. And we are Persons. It says so in the Grammar. We are Persons, the least of us, even a little child like me! What would become of any of you, I should like to know, if some of us did not take care of you?"
"Things and Persons indeed!" they all said, in a very unpleasant and satirical tone. "We know nothing of such philosophical distinctions. But who ever said you or your kind were Things? We paid you no such honour. Who ever said we could get on unless you took care of us? You are not Things indeed! You are servants of Things. We possess you, use you, and outlast you. Who stays in the house—the owner, or the servants? If you were the owners, you would stay. But it is we who stay. We outstay you, generation after generation. Doubtless, therefore, this is our world, and you are merely our slaves—sojourning here for our service, and at our pleasure."
It was useless arguing any further with such obstinate, impenetrable Things. But when, on my return home, I told my mother what they had said, to my surprise she said they were not altogether wrong.
"For," said she, "if we do not use and distribute our possessions, we do not merely sink to their level, but below it. If we are not truly the masters of our Things, we become their slaves."
This set me thinking of my own tiny hoard of treasures, and it occurred to me how disagreeable it would be if at that moment they were talking in any such sarcastic and disrespectful way of me!