From a Seeker after the Ideal House, Recommending the Latest Thing in Windows
Margaret Dear:
Enjoy our new home? Indeed I do, as much as you enjoy “Parva sed Apta.” Yet I confess to a little restlessness at times, such as Browning’s Juan in “Fifine” felt over his “honest civic house.” I want to cut away, and to wander foot-loose and free. And if it weren’t for the magic casement—don’t you want to hear about the magic casement?
The architect’s assistant proposed it, a young fellow with irregular eyebrows and a nice smile. You would like him. We had been talking windows, and he asked me all of a sudden:
“Since you like the type, sha’n’t I put a magic casement in your study? We sometimes find it a very acceptable little addition in suburban building.”
I gasped, and seized on a familiar phrase. “Will it add materially to the cost?” I inquired.
“No, not materially,” he answered. “And it would harmonize capitally with the study.”
For many a day after we moved I forgot all about the conversation and the casement. You know what it is to get settled. The dining-room flue wouldn’t draw, and our invaluable but expansive Maggie grumbled because she had to turn sidewise to get up the narrow back stairs, and to arrange family and furniture absorbed my energies. But a day came finally when I shut myself in the study for a bout of work. A set of examination blue-books had come in from my college classes, and my mood was grim. I learned that the “Shepheard’s Calendar” consisted of twelve pastoral decalogues, and that Ariel’s song was intended to “guide Hamlet to his shipwrecked father,” or, as another student suggested, “to lead Minerva on.” Most of the papers were equally stupid and less funny. My muscles were aching, for the furniture had been heavy. As for my heart, here I was starting life afresh and receiving felicitations in a pretty new house, but life seemed over. Well, dear, never mind that; but you will understand. You know what narrow house guarded by two tall cypresses is always before my eyes.
Suddenly I noticed the casement. I never had tried the patent spring.