"Please let me help you," said Eva, taking up the napkin sociably, "I do so love old china."
And pretty soon one might have seen a gay morning party—Mrs. Betsey washing, Eva wiping, and Miss Dorcas the while reading scraps out of Abbotsford about Maida, and Finette, and Hamlet, and Camp, and Percy, and others of Walter Scott's four-footed friends. The ice of ceremony and stiffness was not only broken by this bit of morning domesticity, but floated gaily down-stream never to be formed again.
You may go further into the hearts of your neighbors by one-half hour of undressed rehearsal behind the scenes than a century of ceremonious posing before the foot-lights.
Real people, with anything like heart and tastes and emotions, do not enjoy being shut up behind barricades, and conversing with their neighbors only through loop-holes. If any warm-hearted adventurer gets in at the back door of the heart, the stiffest and most formal are often the most thankful for the deliverance.
The advent of this pretty young creature, with her air of joy and gaiety, into the shadowed and mossy precincts of the old Vanderheyden house was an event to be dated from, as the era of a new life. She was to them a flower, a picture, a poem; and a thousand dear remembrances and new capabilities stirred in the withered old hearts to meet her.
Her sincere artlessness and naïf curiosity, her genuine interest in the old time-worn furniture, relics and belongings of the house gave them a new sense of possession. We seem to acquire our things over again when stimulated by the admiration of a new spectator.
"Dear me," said Eva, as she put down a tea-cup she was wiping, "what a pity I haven't some nice old china to begin on! but all my things are spick and span new; I don't think it's a bit interesting. I do love to see things that look as if they had a history."
"Ah! my dear child, you are making history fast enough," said Miss Dorcas, with that kind of half sigh with which people at eighty look down on the aspirants of twenty; "don't try to hurry things."
"But I think old things are so nice," said Eva. "They get so many associations. Things just out of Tiffany's or Collamore's haven't associations—there's no poetry in them. Now, everything in your house has its story. It's just like the old villas I used to see in Italy where the fountains were all mossy."