“One moment!” he would say, smiling the superior half-pitying smile which was really responsible for Cain's killing Abel that time.
Abel smiled just exactly in that way and so Cain killed him, and if you're asking me, he got exactly what was coming to him. “One moment!” he would say. “You've never built a house before, have you?”
“No,” I would confess, “but—but—”
“Then, pardon me, but I have! What I am trying to do is to keep you from making the mistakes I made. Almost anybody will make mistakes building his first house. I only wish I'd had somebody round to advise me as I'm advising you before I O. K.'d the plans and signed the contract. As it was, it cost me four thousand dollars to pull out two walls so that we could have a sun parlor. If you go ahead and build your house without having a sun parlor you'll never regret it but once—and that'll be all the time you live in it. Look here now, while I show you how easily you can do it.” And so on and so forth until we would capitulate and I'd write “Memo—sun parlor, sure,” on my little pad.
Take for example the matter of sleeping porches.
Personally I have never been drawn greatly to the idea of sleeping outdoors. I used to think an outdoor bedroom must be almost as inconvenient as an outdoor bathroom, and with me bathing has always been a solitary pleasure. I have felt that I would not be at my best while bathing before an audience. That may denote selfishness on my part, but such is my nature and I cannot change it. I suppose this prejudice against bathing before a crowd is constitutional with me—hereditary, as it were. All my folks were awfully peculiar that way.
When they felt that they needed bathing they also felt that they needed privacy. I sometimes think that my family must have been descended from Susanna. She was a Biblical lady and so did not have any last name, but you probably recall her from the circumstance of her having been surprised while bathing by two snoopy elders. Whenever one of the Old Masters ran out of other subjects to paint, he would paint a picture of Susanna and the elders. In no two of their pictures did she look alike, but in all of them that I've ever seen she looked embarrassed. Yes, I dare say Susanna was our direct ancestress. Like practically all Southern families, ours is a very old family and I've always been led to believe that we go back a long way. True, I've never heard the Old Testament mentioned in this connection, but in view of the fact of our family being such an old or Southern family I reckon it is but fair to presume that we go back fully that far if not farther.
Indeed I have been told that in my infancy a friend of the family, a man who had delved rather into archeology, on calling one day remarked that I had a head shaped exactly like a cuneiform Chaldean brick. It was years later, however, before my parents learned what a cuneiform Chaldean brick looked like and by that time the person who had paid me the compliment was dead and it was too late to take offense at him. And anyhow, in the meantime the contour of my skull had so altered that it was now possible for me to wear a regular child's hat bought out of a store. I point out the circumstance merely as possible collateral evidence showing semiprehistoric hereditary influences to corroborate the more or less direct evidence that as a family we antedate nearly all—if not all—of these Northern families by going back into the very dawn of civilization. I have a great aunt who rather specializes in genealogies and especially our own genealogy and the next time I see her I mean to ask her to consult the authorities and find out whether there is a strain of the Susanna blood in our stock. If she confirms my present belief that there is I shall be very glad to let everybody know about it in an appendix to the next edition of this work.
As with taking a bath outdoors, so with sleeping outdoors; this always was my profound conviction. I had a number of arguments, all good arguments I thought, to offer in support of my position. To begin with, I am what might be called a sincere sleeper, a whole-souled sleeper. I have been told that when I am sleeping and the windows are open everybody in the vicinity knows I am actually sleeping and not lying there tossing about restlessly upon my bed. I would not go so far as to say that I snore, but like most deep thinkers I breathe heavily when asleep. On board a sleeping car I have been known to breathe even more heavily than the locomotive did. I know of this only by hearsay, but when twenty or thirty passengers, all strangers to you, unite in a common statement to the same effect you are bound to admit, if you have any sense of fairness in your make-up, that there must be an element of truth in what they allege.
Very well, then, let us concede that I sleep with the muffler cut out open. In view of this fact I have felt that I would not care to sleep in the open where my style of sleeping might invite adverse comment. In such a matter I try to have a proper consideration for the feelings of others. Indeed I carried it to such a point that when we lived in the closely congested city, with neighboring flat dwellers just across a narrow courtyard, I placed the head of my bed in such a position that I might do the bulk of my breathing up the chimney.