Time to lounge on the sofa, and devour “yellow-covered literature;” time to embroider caps, and collars, and chemisettes; time to contemplate the pretty face where housekeeping might have planted “crows feet,” had she not fortunately foreseen the symptoms, and turned her back on dull Care and all his croaking crew.
Happy Mrs. Emily! No bird let loose from a cage was ever more joyous; not even her own little children—for she had two of them, and pretty creatures they were too, with their cherry lips, and dimpled limbs, and flaxen ringlets; and very weary they grew, of their gloomy nursery, with its one window, commanding a view of a dingy shed and a tall spectral-looking distilhouse chimney, emitting clouds of smoke and suffocating vapor. Nannie, the nurse, didn’t fancy it, either, so she spent her time in the lobbies and entries, challenging compliments from white-jacketed waiters, while the children peeped curiously into the half-open doors, taking drafts of cold air on their bare necks and shoulders. Sometimes they balanced themselves alarmingly on the spiral ballustrade, gazing down into the dizzy Babel below, inhaling clouds of cigar smoke, and listening, with round-eyed wonder, to strange conversations, which memory’s cud should chew, for riper years to digest.
“No children allowed at the table d’hôte”—so the “hotel regulations” pompously set forth—the landlord’s tablecloths, gentlemen’s broadcloth, and ladies’ silk dresses being sworn foes to little Paul Pry fingers. Poor little exiles! they took their sorrowful meals in the servants’ hall, with their respective nurses, the bill of fare consisting of a rehash of yesterday’s French dishes, (spiced for the digestion of an ostrich.) This was followed by a dessert of stale pastry and ancient raisins, each nurse at the outset propitiating her infant charge with a huge bunch, that she might regale herself with the substantials!—mamma, meanwhile, blissfully ignoring the whole affair, absorbed in the sublime occupation of making German worsted dogs.
Papa, too, had his male millennium. No more marketing to do; no more coal, or wood, or kindling to buy; no cistern, or pump, or gaspipe to keep in repair. Such a luxury as it was to have a free pass to the “smoking room,” (alias bar-room,) where the atmosphere was so dense that he couldn’t tell the latitude of his nose, and surrounded by “hale fellows well met.” His eldest boy accompanied him, listening, on his knee, to questionable jokes, which he repeated at bed-time to pert Nannie, the nurse, who understood their significance much better than his innocent little lordship.
Papa, to be sure, had some drawbacks, but they were very trifling;—for instance, his shirts were quite buttonless, his dickeys stringless, and his stockings had ventilator toes;—but then, how could mamma be seen patching and mending in such an aristocratic atmosphere?—she might lose caste; and as to Nannie, her hands were full, what with babies and billet-doux.
You should have seen Mrs. Emily in the evening; with sparkling eyes and bracelets, flounced robe and daintily-shod feet, twisting her Chinese fan, listening to moustached idlers, and recollecting, with a shudder, the long Caudle evenings, formerly divided between her husband, his newspaper, and her darning-needle.
Then the petite soupers at ten o’clock in the evening, where the ladies were enchanting, the gentlemen quite entirely irresistible; where wit and champagne corks flew with equal celerity; and headaches, and dyspepsia, and nightmare, lay perdu amid fried oysters, venison steaks, chicken salad, and India-rubber, anti-temperance jellies.
Then followed the midnight reünion in the drawing-room, where promiscuous polkaing and waltzing, (seen through champagne fumes,) seemed not only proper, but delightful.
It was midnight. There was hurrying to and fro in the entry halls and lobbies; a quick, sharp cry for medical help; the sobs and tears of an agonized mother, and the low moan of a dying child; for nature had rebelled at last, at impure air, unwholesome food, and alternate heats and chills.