“Thank heaven for the babies!” uttered Blanche, throwing her arms about Emma’s waist. “You darling sister! I bless you for them every hour. What should we have done through all these last fearful weeks without them—and you? Touch their weeny teenty patrimony! Indeed you shall not! And more than that, we’ll make it a big one by the time they are ready to enter college.”
The mother, as chief counsellor, had her plan ready for their consideration. The house—a large double one—was still to be occupied by them. The front parlor was to be used for the millinery department, and put entirely under Blanche’s care. In the back, Imogen would hold sway; and a smaller apartment in the rear of the hall should be the fitting and trying-on chamber. The library across the hall, adjoining the dining-room, was to be the family parlor. In every other part of the house things were to remain unchanged.
“Who deserves to live more comfortably and luxuriously, to rest in soft chairs and sleep upon elastic mattresses, to have generous food served elegantly to tempt the appetite and strengthen the body, than she who purchases all these with her own toil?” said the strange logician whose daughters were too used to her “queer notions” to be startled by them. “I do not say that you will make money fast, or at once. I do contend that, saving rent, bookkeeper’s and saleswoman’s wages, as you will do, you ought to be able to clear your business and personal expenses the first year—if nothing more.”
“If the customers come,” suggested Emma.
Mrs. Hiller nodded confidently. “They will come! In the beginning, out of curiosity and the love of novelty. It will depend upon your skill whether they continue their custom.”
All previous sensations respecting the Hillers—their odd fancies and daring talk and levelling theories; Emma’s marriage and the birth of her twins; the tragical death of her husband and Mr. Hiller’s deplorable condition—faded into the realms of forgottenness before that excited by the appearance in all the leading papers, the following month, of an advertisement to the effect that the “Misses Hiller would open on Tuesday, the 15th instant, at their father’s residence on Lofty Avenue, a first-class millinery and dressmaking establishment, and pledged themselves to use their best efforts to give satisfaction to their customers.”
The sudden intrusion of a bee-moth into a well-regulated, honey-lined hive might create such commotion among the inhabitants thereof as prevailed in the “best circles” of the city when the Incredible was, at length, developed by means of printer’s ink and paper, into the Certain. The Hiller philosophy had wrought its legitimate fruits, said the wise ones. Such sympathy with the lower classes, and familiarity with their modes of thought and personal history, amounting to fanatical imitation of their language and habits and mercenary views of life; such bold scoffing at the ethics and usages of SOCIETY (this in capitals half an inch long, if you please, Mr. Printer!) could have but one sequel, and that a catastrophe.
“Be it so!” enunciated resigned Everybody, in the calm of sinless despair. “Since the Hiller girls prefer to sink to the level of mere working women; to fly in the face of Providence that would, if they were more reasonable and less sentimental, endow them with property to the amount of at least fifty thousand dollars—sixty thousand, if poor Mrs. Corwin’s be included, with the certain prospect of fifteen thousand more at poor Mr. Hiller’s death—if they prefer, instead of taking the goods thus offered them and living like ladies in the sphere to which they were born, faithful to the principles that control refined SOCIETY—to delve and plan and accumulate, let them be recognized forthwith as laborers—nothing more, and nothing less! We, the loyal leaguers of SOCIETY, true to the traditions of our class and age, cannot more effectually and dignifiedly exclude them from our sacred circle than by patronizing and paying them as dressmakers and milliners. They have exquisite taste. That we, being candid even where our enemies are concerned, will admit. They have also, tact and energy, and association with US in the past has given them just ideas of our style and needs. While we do not budge an inch from our belief and precept that they should have starved genteelly; lived on bread and tea, dyed and turned and otherwise rejuvenated their friends’ cast-off dresses; shivered over pinched-in grates in winter and sponged upon obliging acquaintances in summer—sooner than thus degrade themselves and betray their caste for the sake of pampering their flesh with the delicacies of the markets, and their pride by indulging in purple and fine linen, in damask and cut-glass, in Brussels and satin—we”—concluded breathless Everybody, “accept the situation as they have set it before us.”
“But it is suicidal!” actually sobbed the well-wishers of the recalcitrant trio. “They will never marry well now!”
“Tuesday the 15th inst.” arrived—sharp but clear November weather, and the desecrated Hiller mansion wore its most cheerful aspect. In the back parlor the decks had been cleared for action, as Imogen phrased it, by removing the piano, a large sofa, and an inlaid stand or two. Imogen’s sewing machine and chair were by the side window. Before the embayed recess at the end of the room was a long, rather narrow table of singular construction, the plan being her own. The top was covered with enamelled leather, with morocco pouches at each corner, rather larger than the pockets of a billiard-table, and deep drawers underneath. A tape-measure and a case of scissors lay upon this. The pictures on the walls; the carpets; the rich hangings of the windows; the lounging-chairs set invitingly about, the easel, with its collection of fine engravings in one corner, a chiffonier loaded with attractive articles of virtu, and a few fresh, attractive books—even the stand of flowers in the bay-window were the same that had so often challenged the admiration of Mrs. Hiller’s guests, as giving her parlors “such an air of home-like elegance.”