But to me, even the list I made out and changed and figured on and priced before I made a single purchase was full of possibilities, and contained wild flutters of excitement on account of certain innovations I wished to try.
"Aubrey," I said one evening as the Angel sat reading Draper's
"Intellectual Development of Europe," "have you any pet theories?"
"What's that? Pet theories about what?"
"Housekeeping."
"I don't quite understand. I've never kept house, you know."
"I mean did your mother keep her house and buy her furniture and manage her servants to suit you, or exactly as you would do if you had been in her place?"
"Not in the least," said the Angel, laying down his book, all interest at once.
"Ah! I knew it! Then you have theories! That's what I wanted to bring out. Now I have theories, too. One is the rag-bag theory."
"The—?"
"The theory that every housewife must have a rag-bag. My mother had one because her mother did and her mother because hers did, and so on back to the English one who probably brought her rag-bag across with her. Ours was made of bed-ticking, and had a draw-string in it and hung in the bathroom closet. Now if you ever tried to lift a heavy bag down from a hook and knew the bother of emptying it of neat little rolls of every sort of cloth from big rolls of cotton-batting to little bundles of silk patches and having to look through every one of them to find a scrap of white taffeta to line a stock, then you know what a trial of temper the family rag-bag is."