Belinda is that lovely lucky creature, the young matron of to-day, setting up housekeeping, not as a daily task, but as a comradely affair. Gone are the walls that used to separate the generations. Belinda is firm friends with her grandmother, and her mother is her clever contemporary. Together they face the world with a friendly affectionate dignity, a reasonable freedom and a healthy ease, that banishes boredom,—lengthens life.
Gone, too, are the cumbrous clumsy methods of housekeeping—basement kitchens, hods of coal, oil lamps and 24-hour bread.... Vanished with the high bicycles and Waspwaists of the “Gay Nineties.”
But the spirit of home-making, the desire to build a pleasant place, and welcome those you love within its walls—remains the same to-day as it has been forever.
That welcoming hearth-warming spirit of unflustered hospitality! Beginning with the dolls’ tea-party, and flowering to graceful perfection in the charming hostess. Belinda knows that no entertainment can be a success, unless the hostess enjoys it herself.
So with the deft adjustment made possible by modern methods, she combines Martha-Service with Mary-Serenity, in a manner entirely her own.
When Belinda
Bridges
or plays Mahjong, she arranges her tea-party to the taste of her guests. If she is a maidless mistress, she excels in those little intimate parties—“just one or two tables,” where tea is an interlude rather than an interval.
Bright and early Belinda makes her most successful cake and a delectable dish of Turkish delight. Sandwiches filled with some clever paste and rolls of wafer bread and butter are trimmed with their attendant sprigs of parsley, celery, or radish roses. Covered lightly with an inverted bowl, and set in the ice-box till the tea hour, they will be crisp, fresh and dainty at 5 o’clock. The tea table, gay with Belinda’s most attractive tea cups, is set by the fireside, or the open window, to suit the season; and tea can be made in a minute.