[INTERIOR DESPERATION]
It is easy nowadays to get advice on how to arrange your home. The Woman's Page in any newspaper will tell you just how your living-room ought to look, just how your hallway may be beautified, and just how your kitchen may be transformed into a scientific laboratory. Scores of books by experts on the subject undertake to instruct you how to change your home from a place to live in to a work of art.
Realizing that my abode needed a little toning-up along modern æsthetic lines, I consulted a book called "The Dwelling Beautiful," which I had been informed would give me just the help I needed. "It is not necessary that your furniture, rugs, hangings, and pictures be expensive," says the author, reassuringly. "The only essential is that they be beautiful in themselves and in restful accord with each other."
Pray, gentle writer, did you ever see my belongings? Did you ever see the marble-and-walnut parlor table that Aunt Jessamine gave me; or the streakily-stained Mission piano, with mottled glass panels and gew-gawy candle-brackets, that my wife won in the guessing contest and is therefore inordinately proud of; or the case of stuffed birds which Uncle Lemuel left me in his will? How am I to make these things "beautiful in themselves and in restful accord with each other?"
The truth is, none of our furnishings are gregarious. From the green rug whose acrid hue assaults every other color in the room, to the wonderfully and fearfully made "ornamental" lamp, each thing is what the advertisement writers would call "different". Rabid in their nonconformity, how am I to make a happy family of them?
The main feud is between our heirlooms and our wedding presents—the former being atrocities in oak, walnut and plush of the Victorian era, and the latter, present-day garishnesses; so that the general effect might be likened to a colon: one period on top of another.
The author of "The Dwelling Beautiful" would probably suggest that I get rid of some of these incumbrances. The lamentable fact is that I can't. My relatives would disown me. For my whole family connection—not to mention my wife's (about which much might be said)—takes upon itself to police my belongings. Every visit of a relative, even the casual call of my most distant cousin, means a critical inspection, a careful stock-taking of heirlooms and wedding presents.
A person who gives you anything as a wedding present never forgets it. His taste may be erratic, but his memory is inexorable. Because a thing happened to catch his fancy in an off-moment, it is anchored in your home forever. And the feeling of self-appreciation for his generosity, which he experiences whenever he beholds his gift in after years, prevents him from admitting, even to himself, that he was out of his mind when he bought it. Hence, you are doomed to be its perpetual curator, with the obligation to display it prominently, so that whenever he chooses to enter your house he may see it and claim it with his eye.