“You men are intolerable. After attending to your own affairs all day, and being free from the fuss of housekeeping, you expect to come home and shuffle into your slippers, and snooze over the evening paper—if it were possible to snooze over the exciting and respectable evening journal you take—while we are to sew, and talk with you if you are talkative, and darn the stockings, and make tea. You come home tired, and likely enough, surly, and gloom about like a thundercloud if dinner isn’t ready for you the instant you are ready for it, and then sit mum and eat it; and snap at the children, and show yourselves the selfish, ugly things you are. Am I to have no fun, never go to the opera, never go to a ball, never have a party at home? Men are tyrants, Mr. Potiphar. They are ogres who entice us poor girls into their castles, and then eat up our happiness and scold us while they eat.”
Well, I suppose it is so. I suppose I am an ogre and enticed Polly into my castle. But she didn’t find it large enough, and teased me to build another. I suppose she does sit with me in the evening, and sew, and make tea, and wait upon me. I suppose she does, but I’ve not a clear idea of it. I know it’s unkind of me, when I have been hard at work all day, trying to make and secure the money that gives her and her family everything they want, and which wearies me body and soul, to expect her to let me stay at home, and be quiet. I know I ought to dress and go into Gnu’s house, and smirk at his wife, and stand up in a black suit before him attired in the same way, and talk about the same stocks that we discussed down town in the morning in colored trowsers. That’s a social duty, I suppose. And I ought to see various slight young gentlemen whirl my wife around the room, and hear them tell her when they stop, that it’s very warm. That’s another social duty, I suppose. And I must smile when the same young gentlemen put their elbows into my stomach, and hop on my feet in order to extend the circle of the dance. I’m sure Mrs. P. is right. She does very right to ask, “Have we no social duties, I should like to know?”
And when we have performed these social duties in Gnu’s house, how mean it is, how “it looks,” not to build a larger house for him and Mrs. Gnu to come and perform their social duties in. I give it up. There’s no doubt of it.
One day Polly said to me:
“Mr. Potiphar, we’re getting down town.”
“What do you mean, my dear?”
“Why, everybody is building above us, and there are actually shops in the next street. Singe, the pastry-cook, has hired Mrs. Croesus’s old house.”
“I know it. Old Croesus told me so some time ago; and he said how sorry he was to go. ‘Why, Potiphar,’ said he, ‘I really hoped when I built there, that I should stay, and not go out of the house, finally, until I went into no other. I have lived there long enough to love the place, and have some associations with it; and my family have grown up in it, and love the old house too. It was our home. When any of us said ‘home’ we meant not the family only, but the house in which the family lived, where the children were all born, and where two have died, and my old mother, too. I’m in a new house now, and have lost my reckoning entirely. I don’t know the house; I’ve no associations with it. The house is new, the furniture is new, and my feelings are new. It’s a farce for me to begin again, in this way. But my wife says it’s all right, that everybody does it, and wants to know how it can be helped; and, as I don’t want to argue the matter, I look amen.’ That’s the way Mr. Croesus submits to his new house, Mrs. Potiphar.”
She doesn’t understand it. Poor child! how should she? She, and Mrs. Croesus, and Mrs. Gnu, and even Mrs. Settum Downe, are all as nomadic as Bedouin Arabs. The Rev. Cream Cheese says, that he sees in this constant migration from one house to another, a striking resemblance to the “tents of a night,” spoken of in Scripture. He imparts this religious consolation to me when I grumble. He says, that it prevents a too-closely clinging affection to temporary abodes. One day, at dinner, that audacious wag, Boosey, asked him if the “many manthuns” mentioned in the Bible, were not as true of mortal as of immortal life. Mrs. Potiphar grew purple, and Mr. Cheese looked at Boosey in the most serious manner over the top of his champagne-glass. I am glad to say that Polly has properly rebuked Gauche Boosey for his irreligion, by not asking him to her Saturday evening matinees dansantes.
There was no escape from the house, however. It must be built. It was not only Mrs. Potiphar that persisted, but the spirit of the age and of the country. One can’t live among shops. When Pearl street comes to Park Place, Park Place must run for its life up to Thirtieth street. I know it can’t be helped, but I protested, and I will protest. If I’ve got to go, I’ll have my grumble. My wife says: