“Wait until I build my house; then you shall see,” she would exclaim, with a decided little nod which carried the conviction, to one listener at least, that she would some time show what money and brains combined could do towards creating an ideal home.
Many an hour, when driving about together, we had amused ourselves, in the intervals of serious work, in planning the charming mansion which she would build, and she had entered into it all with great zest.
“My idea of a house,” she had said, “is to have it even more beautiful without than within, so that every line may be a positive delight to the many who can never look within its doors. Think what a boon to the thousands who never step inside a church are those Back Bay towers and steeples which I used to see from my attic window on the hill.
“A poor man has no money for a concert of good music; he has no time for a visit to an art museum to see a good picture or statue, or to go to a library to read a great poem; but in sunlight and in moonlight, seven days in the week, as he looks from his window or passes to his work, the beauty wrought in stone is his; it costs him neither time nor money, and consciously or unconsciously it appeals to him. His life is larger and richer for it.
“A walk across the Public Garden on a winter afternoon, with that campanile and the spires near it looming large and dark against the crimson glow in the west, has made me fresh and strong after many a tired day,” she used to say.
So it was settled that when the walls of the House Beautiful should be reared, the first thought should be, not for its inmates, but for the countless unknown passers-by.
Then the next requirement was that it should have ample room for the many guests whom its hospitable mistress would always have around her. There was to be air and sunshine everywhere, and nothing too fine for constant use.
Unlike most women, Mildred had little fancy for beauty of the fragile sort. Exquisitely painted sèvres which a careless touch might shiver to atoms; cobweb lace that had cost the eyesight and health of other women; tapestry which had swallowed up years of another’s life, only to be inferior to a painting, and become food for moths,—all this she obstinately refused to have.
“I want beautiful things about me,” she said; “but beauty that is so perishable as to be a constant care to the owner, or else to entail an army of servants, is a luxury which I think no rational being can afford. I shall have everything rich and strong and yet simple; there shall be no satin, gilded-legged chairs, no elaborate dust-catching carvings; no draperies and carpets that cannot bear the sun; but there shall be noble statues, pictures by great masters, luxurious rugs and divans, glorious color from jewelled windows and precious, many-hued marbles. I do not want a palace with dreary suites of high-studded rooms and frescoed ceilings, and I do not want a house that is nothing but a crowded museum of bric-à-brac, like so many I see. No; my house shall be a stately mansion with far-seeing towers and turrets, with cosy, low-studded rooms and wainscoted walls, with pillared arcades and richly carved stone balconies. All Spain and Venice and Nuremberg shall be studied for hints of beauty, and it shall be a home, a perfectly ideal American home; beautiful without and within; built to stand while generations come and go, graced by children, pets, and flowers, and the charming society of noble men and women.”
Where this home was to be built had not yet been decided. Sometimes Mildred would in imagination place it on some smooth, green slope on the banks of the Hudson; sometimes among the elms on some hilltop overlooking the golden dome on Beacon Hill, with a glimpse of blue sea and white sails on the far horizon beyond.