“My dear Mrs. Blank!” cried the wealthy economist, “do you expect to have all this and heaven, too?”
“I expect to enjoy heaven the more for having made the best of the Father’s gifts to me here,” answered the matron of advanced ideas.
Ideas, which I record with devout gratification, are fast relegating to a dusty and dishonored past, the “best room” of farmhouse and town mansion never opened except for visitors. With it is going the basement sitting-room, “low” in every sense of the word, which used to be thought good enough for the family. Expensive furniture, kept with real china and solid silver for “occasions”—that is, when appearances must be kept up before comparative strangers and acquaintances for whom, taken as individuals, the appearance-worshipers care less than nothing; fine clothes, worn above mean undergarments; sounding phrases aired, like the reserve of linen sheets, for company use—have more influence upon character than we are willing to believe. It is well to put the best foot foremost. It is better to have both feet decently shod and alike serviceable. Each of us knows plenty of people who have company tones, company smiles, company phraseology, company opinions—unwisely kept for show. One and all, singly and collectively, they mean to imply something which the wearers thereof are not. Their “appearances” are social electroplating, moral veneering. Slipshod at home and every day; well-groomed abroad and in the sight of those to whom it makes not an atom of difference how the hypocrites look or act,—“home devils and street angels,” as plain-spoken critics style them,—such is the great host of those who keep up appearances because they have not souls above shams, whose dusters and mops never visit the insides of burnished cups and platters. Verily they have their reward, but the prizes are as ignoble as the recipients and their motives.
We see, or may see, if we use our senses aright, the heroic side of the question. My heart aches with the thought of scores of examples which pass under my eyes in the lives of unknown martyrs of whom this world is not worthy, by whom the world to come will be made the worthier abiding-place of those for whom the Father has prepared it.
An old woman, who knew the Bronté sisters as children and women, told me that their body linen was darned by a thread until the original fabric hardly showed between the mending.
“But it was always whole and clean, and they made it as carefully as if it were to be trimmed with real lace. Nobody ever saw a rip in their gloves, and they cleaned them themselves. They looked like the ladies they were. Not a bit fashionable, but downright ladylike, you know. They always kept themselves up.”
I heard another “downright ladylike” girl, who is almost as poor as the Yorkshire sisters were, insist, the other day, upon dressing for the family dinner when the relative with whom she lived begged her not to change her walking costume.
“You are so tired, my dear, after teaching all day!”
“We working women can not take such liberties with ourselves,” said the spirited heroine. “If we let the forms of elegant propriety and conventionality go, we are in danger of forgetting what they represent.”
Of a like strain was the regard for appearances that led young Ellsworth, who was killed early in the Civil War, decline an invitation to dine with a business acquaintance at a restaurant when Ellsworth was so hungry that the smell of the food made him almost frantic. He was then a poor student working his way through a New York law school. In referring to the incident in more prosperous days, Colonel Ellsworth explained that he could not have accepted a courtesy he would not be able to repay in kind.