At first the only upstairs rooms that will have to be furnished are Angelina’s bedroom, Edwin’s dressing-room, one spare room, and a room for the maid or maids, leaving any others until a nursery be required; for if our young people have only one servant it is quite impossible that they will be able to have a constant succession of folks staying in the house, and, therefore, one bedroom besides their own is all that should be prudently ready for occupation. I say ‘prudently,’ for few young housekeepers can resist at first the delights of showing off their houses and their presents to their less fortunate relations, and, in consequence, a stream of visitors is invited to pour into the house, to the detriment of anything like order, and to the dismay of the servant, who is most certainly right to grumble at all the extra work; and, by the way, I may mention here that to this same stream is due more than half the worry brides have at first with their domestics.
Also, the bedrooms should be kept very nice. This no one servant can do, unless she is considered and helped, and I should strongly advise Angelina not to be above making her own bed, even if she have a housemaid as well as a cook, for she and the housemaid together can shake it up and fold the blankets and sheets nicely and neatly, while the cook is clearing away breakfast, and interviewing the tradespeople downstairs, whose orders should be ready written out for them by the mistress, so that there should be no loitering at the back door, wasting time for both the cook and the men too. But before I go into the divers methods of bed-making, and speak of the beds themselves, I should like to describe one or two rooms, as far as paper and paint go, and give some idea of the colours I consider fittest for a bedroom. Formerly, anything in that way did for a room, where no one then seemed to remember we had to spend a good part of our lives, and where we had occasionally to be ill and miserable, and wanted as much help over our troubles as we could obtain from our surroundings; and who does not recollect the orthodox bedroom of her youth—the fearful paper, all blue roses and yellow lilies, or, what was worse still, the dreary drab and orange, or green upon green scrolls and foliage, that we used to contemplate with horror, wondering why such frightful papers were made! Then came the carpet, a threadbare monstrosity, with great sprawling green leaves and red blotches, ‘made over,’ as the Yankees say, from a first appearance in a drawing-room, where it had spent a long and honoured existence, and where its enormous design was not quite as much out of place as it was in the upper chambers. Indeed, the bedrooms, as a whole, seemed to be furnished, as regards a good many items, out of the cast-off raiment of the downstairs rooms; and curtains that had seen better days, and chairs too decrepit to be honourable company in the downstairs apartments, all crept up into the bedrooms, anything being good enough for a room where ‘company’ would not be expected to enter.
I myself remember a carpet that began life quite forty years ago, for it was over ten years old when I made its acquaintance in a country dining-room; it was drab, and was ‘enlivened’ with spots of brown, like enlarged ladybirds. It lived for twenty years in that room, covered in holland in the summer, and preserved from winter wear by the most appallingly frightful printed red and green ‘felt square’ I ever saw; it then was altered for the schoolroom, then went up into ‘the girl‘s’ bedroom, and still exists in strips beside the servants’ beds, although the original owner of that fearful possession has been dead over twenty of those forty years; and when I consider the dirt and dust that has become a part and parcel of it, I am only thankful that our pretty cheap carpets do not last as carpets used to do, for I am sure such a possession cannot be healthy; though the present proud possessor points to the strips, as a proof of how much better things used to wear in her mother’s days, than they do now, in these iconoclastic ones of ours.
I am afraid I am not an orthodox housekeeper, for I confess most frankly I do not want my things to wear for ever, certainly not my carpets and curtains, and that is one reason why I am so thankful for the present style of pretty light cretonnes, mattings, and Kidderminster carpets. They are so clean and bright, and enable us to have our bedrooms fresh, pleasant, and new, instead of making them up out of things that have seen their best days in another sphere; and as I want Angelina to recollect she may have to spend some little time in the bedroom occasionally, as years go by, I wish to impress upon her to remember all this in the arrangement of the house, and to be sure and buy only those colours that give her pleasure, and to have no jarring ugliness to fret her, and add in any measure to her time of illness and convalescence; for, as I have said before, no one knows how much we are affected insensibly by our surroundings, and how much our spirits are affected too by what we have to look at!
The first thing to recollect in choosing one’s paper is that there should be nothing aggravating in it—no turns and twists that shall bother us as we lie in bed; no squares or triangles that flatly refuse to join; in fact, nothing special that can possibly worry us. I had once on one of my walls a
