"Yes, and we can do that," said she. "You have only to resolve to be free, and you are free. Now, that is the beauty of our being married. Alone, we are parts of other families, drawn along with them—entrained, as the French say: now we are married, we can do as we please; we become king and queen of a new state. In our own house we can have our own ways. We are monarchs of all we survey."
"True," said I, "and a home and a family that has an original and individual life of its own, is always recognized in time as a fait accompli. You and I will be for the future 'The Hendersons;' and people will say the Hendersons do this and that, or the Hendersons don't do the other. They will study us as one studies a new State."
"Yes," said she, taking up my idea in her vivacious way, "and when they have ascertained our latitude and longitude, soil and productions, manners and customs, they can choose whether they like to visit us."
"And you are not in the least afraid of having it said, 'The Hendersons are odd?'" asked I.
"Not a bit of it," replied Eva, "so long as the oddity is some unusual form of comfort. For example, a sitting-room like your uncle's, with its brass andirons and blazing wood fire, its books and work, its motherly lounges, would be a sort of exotic in New York, where people, as a matter of course, expect a pier-glass and marble slab, a somber concatenation of cord and tassels and damask curtains, and a given number of French chairs and ottomans, veiled with linen covers, and a general funereal darkness of gentility. Now, I propose to introduce the country sitting room into our New York house. Your mother already has given me her wedding andirons—perfect loves—with shovel and tongs corresponding; and I am going to have a bright, light, free and easy room which the sunshine shall glorify."
"But you know, my love, wood is very dear in New York."
"So are curtains, and ottomans, and mirrors, and marble slabs, and quantities of things which we shall do without. And then, you see, we don't propose to warm our house with a wood-fire, but only to adorn it. It is an altar fire that we will kindle every evening, just to light up our room and show it to advantage. How charming every thing looks at your mother's in that time between daylight and dark, when you all sit round the hearth, and the fire lights up the pictures and the books, and makes every thing look so dreamy and beautiful!"
"You are a little poet, my dear; it will be your specialty to turn life into poetry."
"And that is what I call woman's genius. To make life beautiful; to keep down and out of sight the hard, dry, prosaic side, and keep up the poetry—that is my idea of our 'mission.' I think woman ought to be, what Hawthorne calls, 'The Artist of the Beautiful.'"