'All this sounds like praise,' said Grace, 'yet I feel that you are keeping something back. What is the matter with Adelaide's house?'
Again Honoria hesitated.
'It seems ungracious to find fault with such a perfectly worthy performance, yet I came away chilled and uncomfortable, almost unhappy, indeed. Thinking about the matter on the way home, it became clear to me at last that the house is too large for Adelaide's personality. You know how perfectly she pervaded that old house of hers. Old-fashioned, in some respects inconvenient, with far less perfect fittings, it still was thoroughly delightful, for where the rugs failed or the draperies faltered, Adelaide's personality somehow stepped in and eked out all insufficiencies, corrected all errors. It was hers entirely. In this blameless achievement of architect and decorator, there are no insufficiencies to be eked out, and so Adelaide's personality seems to slip and slide helplessly upon a kind of glacial surface which it cannot penetrate and make its own. I may be expressing myself very poorly, but I know I have hold of something real. Adelaide's new house, good-looking as it is, is not interesting,—that is what I mean,—and even the dear woman herself seems less interesting, and less herself now that she is enfolded in it.'
'Did you know,' interposed Martha, 'that the first winter in a new house the heating actually requires more coal than is ever needed again?'
'No, I didn't know that—but I can well believe it. Why shouldn't it take more coal to warm it when it evidently takes more vitality to cheer it? It's a serious business, this breaking in of a large house to one's self late in life, as so many Americans do. The draughts upon their vital forces are more taxing than the coal bills.'
'We all ought to live in inherited homesteads,' suggested Grace,'where the humanizing of the bricks and mortar has been done for us by our own people.'
'Honoria,' Martha demanded, ignoring this unpractical suggestion, 'tell me the truth! If you were in Adelaide's place and had carte blanche to incarnate your idea of a house for yourself and your family, wouldn't you over-build and over-decorate too? I should enjoy doing it! The furniture in my bungalow is altogether too sketchy at present, and I am tired of eking it out with personality. You would feel differently if you hadn't brought your old mahogany when you came West!'
Honoria set a few stitches, and looked at her friends with eyes in which conviction flamed.
'I don't over-dress, and I don't over-eat, though I have abundant opportunity,' she said, 'but it may be that I would over-build and over-decorate, or at least that I would have done so until yesterday. I don't think I would do it to-day—now that I know what ails Adelaide's house. As for your bungalow, Martha, it is comfortable and it is alive. There isn't a picture on the wall nor an ornament on the mantel that hasn't a reason for being exactly where it is. That is triumph, and you know it. I don't believe you would really exchange your house for Adelaide's.'
'Try me and see! I would like just for once to ignore beauty and suitability, and go in for size and sheer, luxurious comfort.'