CHAPTER XXXI.
The setting sun streamed in upon a parlor on St. John's Square. One might have mistaken it for an upholsterer's ware-room, so loaded was it with chairs, sofas, and tête-à-têtes, of every conceivable size and pattern. The same taste had hung the walls with pictures, whose coloring, perspectives, and foreshortening would have driven a true artist mad; the gaudy frames, with their elaborate gildings, being the magnet which had drawn the money from the pocket of the lady hostess.
Distorted mythology, in various forms, looked down from little gilt roosts in the corners, peeped at you from under tables, stared at you from out niches. Books there were, whose principal merit was their "pretty binding," the exception to this being in the shape of a large Family Bible, splendidly bound, and on the present occasion ostentatiously placed on the center-table, for Mrs. Howe had at last a baby, and this was christening-day.
Mrs. Howe had an idea that it was more exclusive and genteel to have this little ceremony performed in the house. There was to be a splendid christening—cake and wine, after the baptism, and only the appreciative select were to be present.
Mrs. Howe had expended a small fortune on the baby's christening-cap and robe, not to speak of her own dress, which she considered, coiffure and tournure, to be unsurpassable; and now she was flying in and out, with that vulgar fussiness so common to your would-be-fine-lady; giving orders, and countermanding them in the same breath, screaming up stairs and down to the servants; at one moment foolishly familiar with them, and at the next reprehensibly severe; pulling the furniture this way and that, and making her servants as much trouble, and herself as red in the face as possible. "Dolly Smith," was too much for "Mrs. John Howe." St. John's Square had an odor of the milliner's shop.
The baby slept as quietly as if it were not the heroine of the day; as if all the novels, and poems, and newspaper stories had not been ransacked for fitting appellations; as if its mother had not nudged its father in the ribs for fourteen consecutive nights, to know if "he had thought of any thing."
Mr. John Howe! who had married on purpose to get rid of thinking; who had no more sentiment than a stove funnel; who would not have cared had his baby been named Zerubbabel or Kerenhappuch; who was contented to let the world wag on in its own fashion, provided it did not meddle with his "pipe."
Yes, Mr. Howe smoked "a pipe." Mrs. Howe got up several hysteric fits about it, but on that point only he was immovable, spite of smelling-salts and burned feathers. Finally, Mrs. Howe made up her mind to remove the odium by artistifying it, and with the sweetest conjugal smile presented him with an expensive chibouk, to take the place of that leveling clay pipe. She also added a crimson velvet smoking-cap, in which she declared he looked "as Oriental as a dervish."
"Thunder!" exclaimed Mr. Howe, as he caught sight of himself in a glass, "you have made me look like that foreign fool of a conjuror we went to see the other evening, who turned eggs into watches. You don't expect me to wear this gimcrack?"