Of course I was to have the fun of helping to plan about it all, and Mildred was to bring home hosts of treasures from Europe after her sojourn abroad. But now, this morning, all this dream of the beauty that was to be had been ended by what Mildred had been saying.
“I have settled one hundred thousand dollars on Ralph,” she had said, “for his own personal use. He would not accept any more, and I have decided to set apart for myself the same sum. The interest on two hundred thousand dollars ought, I think, to provide all the travel and luxuries that two reasonable mortals need; and the rest of the money which I had at first thought of spending on myself we are going to devote to several things, rather better worth doing than building a house, which not one in a hundred thousand could afford to maintain after we have gone.”
“But, Mildred,” I expostulated, “you have always asserted that it was right to encourage art; that it was folly to refuse to buy a picture or a jewel just because there were still starving people in existence somewhere. I have heard you say repeatedly that money thus spent gave employment to labor, encouraged art, and”—
“Yes,” she interrupted, “that is true in a certain way, no doubt; but listen: I have been thinking this over a great deal of late. Suppose now that I spend half a million or so in employing a certain number of people to make and furnish a magnificent house. Grant that it is a real work of art, and will be a thing of beauty and a joy forever. My husband and a score of friends and I enjoy it; the workmen are paid; ‘art is encouraged.’
“Now suppose again that, instead of erecting an expensively beautiful house for myself, I employ the same number of people to provide a beautiful building which shall be for the use, in the course of its existence, of scores of thousands whose eyes are inured to ugliness and into whose lives a bit of beauty rarely comes.
“Suppose that the spacious marble staircases, the tiles and wood carvings and painted windows, are put where they shall awaken the imagination and delight the soul of tired mothers and little children who have known nothing beyond their narrow alley and grimy chimney-pots; of girls who stand all day before a machine, or over a hot stove, and who spend their money for the bits of tawdry finery which are the nearest approach to beauty that their means can compass? Which building would encourage art the most, think you?
“Why, Ruby,” said Mildred, wheeling around from her desk, while I stood opposing to her ardor a face of grim discontent; “do you fancy that I could sit in my great, palatial house, remembering the sights that I have seen this year in the one-roomed sod houses on bleak Western prairies, in the dingy, cheerless cabins of the colored people at the South, and in the vile-smelling tenements of this great city, and satisfy my soul by saying that I gave employment to the men who did this work for me?
“Could I honestly call myself in any sense a follower of Him who had not where to lay his head, and know that this wealth of beauty was kept for me and a dozen or so cultivated people who need it scarcely more than I, while a thousand beauty-loving natures were starving who might be fed by my superabundance?”
“Mildred, you are positively morbid,” I exclaimed, thoroughly vexed. “To be sure, no one has a right to be selfish, to think of himself first,—but that you have not done. You planned your house in the beginning for the pleasure of others far more than for yourself. You meant to make your home a perfect retreat for all the poor artists and students and broken-down teachers that it could hold, and I say you are making a great mistake if you think that you are going to serve humanity better by building a big art museum down at the Mulberry Bend for the benefit of the ragpickers and stevedores, than by giving the hospitality of such a home as yours would be to those to whom it would be a rest and an inspiration.”
Mildred laughed heartily as I paused, and dropping upon the hassock beside me, she drew me close to her, while I prepared to renew my expostulations.