'The direct result of helping ourselves to too much of anything is to coarsen and degrade. We can see this clearly as regards the primal necessity of food. Nature promptly writes it, in large letters, all over the man or woman of gross appetites.'
'It is as plainly printed, if in smaller type, on the faces of those who want too much of other things,—houses, notoriety, money, power,—what you will. The porcine brand is there, however disguised. Personally, I fear the Mark of the Pig as I fear nothing else on earth. Shaler says that certain lines of evolution terminate in such grotesque effects that one almost believes the guiding thought behind the process was humorous. I never see a stye with its squealing, shouldering inhabitants, without thinking how tremendously satiric it is—a master-caricature of human greed, not over-drawn! And I say, "Brother Pig, Heaven grant that I keep my voracities better concealed than thou."'
Her companions regarded Honoria, in type thin, nervous, ardent, with a keen and vivid face. The comparison was certainly not apparent—but the heart knoweth its own gluttonies.
'You are doing fairly well at it thus far,' said Martha dryly. 'What's the next step in your argument, Honoria?'
'Since our capacity is limited, and since to glut ourselves beyond it burdens and degrades, clearly the thing for each individual with intelligence to do is to find out where, for him, lies the golden point beyond which riches turns to the poverty of burden. When even the wise and earnest Adelaides get their houses too big and don't know what is the matter, it is time to formulate the principles of First Aid to the Prosperous. I believe the point from which the women of the comfortable classes should attack the problem of a saner living is this doctrine of limitation and selection, and that we should attack it first of all in our homes.
'Now, we human beings really do something to our immediate material surroundings which I can best describe as charging them with our personality. With the revolution of the days, personality accumulates in the things we handle and love and live with, much as electricity gathers upon the accumulator of a static machine with the revolution of the plates. This idea has always been popular with the poets and artists, but people who advance it in everyday life always do so apologetically, with the air of saying, "I know this is slightly fantastic, but doesn't it seem true?" Yet most housekeepers know its utter truth. I never doubted from the time I consciously began to care for old furniture, old rugs, old china—all the beautiful cast-offs of vanished lives—that a vast part of their charm was atmosphere, something imparted to them by the affection of those forgotten ones and now inhering, for the perceptive vision, in their very substance. The craftsman of those elder days is not the only creator of the beauty that has come down to us. Whoever has loved another's work has thereby added something to it. Is it not so? And I, in my turn, ought to be beautifying my belongings for those who come after me.'
Grace and Martha nodded readily enough, for this doctrine needs no long expounding to any woman who has lived her way into her material possessions, and distilled atmosphere from them for the comfort of her household. She knows what she has done, and knows, though she says little about it, that this business of turning lifeless into living things is one of her important natural functions.
'When I studied physics,' Honoria went on, 'I learned that science had been compelled to posit ether, an all-pervading, absolutely elastic, wave-bearing substance, to explain the commonest facts of our physical experience. Later yet, I learned that the passage of thought-waves through ether had found defenders among men of the exact sciences. Naturally I said to myself, "Ah, the scientists are growing 'warm.' Next, they will be demonstrating some of the things women have always known. They will show how we send out vibrations that get caught and entangled in our intimate belongings, never to be wholly freed again. The thing will be worked out and demonstrated like a problem in geometry. Doubtless they will be measuring everybody's wave-lengths and teaching children in the Eighth Grade easy ways of charging their belongings with their personality so unmistakably that stealing will have to become a lost art." Well! They haven't done it yet. In fact, they don't seem so near doing it as they once did. The mechanism of the process by which I take a chair fresh from Grand Rapids and in the course of years make it my chair and no other woman's, is a secret still, but I don't have to argue with anybody who ever had a favorite chair that the thing is as I have stated it. Neither do I have to argue that I could not so appropriate and make my own the output of an entire factory. It must be equally obvious that the dignified, proper environment for me and my family contains what we can thus make our own, and not much more.'
'Of course there are people,' said Martha reflectively, 'the routine of whose living demands large and formal apartments, impossible to do anything with from your point of view.'
'Assuredly there are such people,' Honoria admitted, 'just as there are people whose entertaining must be in the line of banquets rather than little dinners. I am not predicating a world full of model cottages, even though I think it might prove the happiest world. Still, outside of official circles, the need of state drawing-rooms is certainly not general, and it is of the very gist of my argument—my argument isn't all developed yet, Martha, don't think it!—that for the sake of developing a finer and more individual quality in our possessions, we should cut off some superfluous ones. Please listen patiently while I carry the idea to its logical limit, even though that limit lies beyond the bounds of practicability.