he imitative efforts of women at “extra-illustrating” are usually
limited to buying a set of photographs at Rome and sticking them into the cracks of “The Marble Faun,” and giving it away to a friend as a marked favor
Poor Hawthorne! he would wriggle in his grave if he could see his fair admirers doing this. Mr. Blades certainly ought to have included women among the enemies of books. They generally regard the husband’s or father’s expenditure on books as so much spoil of their gowns and jewels. We book-men are up to all the tricks of getting the books into the house without their knowing it
What joy and glee when we successfully smuggle in a parcel from the express, right under our wife’s nose, while she is busy talking scandal to another woman in the drawing-room! The good creatures make us positively dishonest and endanger our eternal welfare. How we “hustle around” in their absence, when the embargo is temporarily raised; and when the new purchases are detected, how we pretend that they are old, and wonder that they have not seen them before, and rattle away in a fevered, embarrassed manner about the scarcity and value of the surreptitious purchases, and how meanly conscious we are all the time that the pretense is unavailing and the fair despots see right through us
God has given them an instinct that is more than a match for our acknowledged superior intellect. And the good wife smiles quietly but satirically, and says, in the form in that case made and provided, “My dear, you’ll certainly ruin yourself buying books!” with a sigh that agitates a very costly diamond necklace reposing on her shapely bosom; or she archly shakes at us a warning finger all aglow with ruby and sapphire, which she has bought on installments out of the house allowance. Fortunate for us if the library is not condemned to be cleaned twice a year. These beloved objects ought to deny themselves a ring, or a horse, or a gown, or a ball now and then, to atone for their mankind’s debauchery in books; but do they? They ought to encourage the Bibliomania, for it keeps their husbands out of mischief, away from “that horrid club,” and safe at home of evenings. The Book-Worm is always a blameless being. He never has to hie to Canada as a refuge. He is “absolutely pure,” like all the baking powders
