"In the first place, then, let us watch our course when we are entertaining strangers whose good opinion we wish to propitiate. We dress ourselves with care, we study what it will be agreeable to say, we do not suffer our natural laziness to prevent our being very alert in paying small attentions, we start across the room for an easier chair, we stoop to pick up the fan, we search for the mislaid newspaper, and all this for persons in whom we have no particular interest beyond the passing hour; while with those friends whom we love and respect we sit in our old faded habiliments, and let them get their own chair, and look up their own newspaper, and fight their own way daily, without any of this preventing care.
"In the matter of personal adornment, especially, there are a great many people who are chargeable with the same fault that I have already spoken of in reference to household arrangements. They have a splendid wardrobe for company, and a shabby and sordid one for domestic life. A woman puts all her income into party-dresses, and thinks anything will do to wear at home. All her old tumbled finery, her frayed, dirty silks and soiled ribbons, are made to do duty for her hours of intercourse with her dearest friends. Some seem to be really principled against wearing a handsome dress in every-day life; they 'cannot afford' to be well-dressed in private. Now what I should recommend would be to take the money necessary for one or two party-dresses and spend it upon an appropriate and tasteful home-toilette, and to make it an avowed object to look prettily at home.
"We men are a sort of stupid, blind animals: we know when we are pleased, but we don't know what it is that pleases us; we say we don't care anything about flowers, but if there is a flower-garden under our window, somehow or other we are dimly conscious of it, and feel that there is something pleasant there; and so when our wives and daughters are prettily and tastefully attired, we know it, and it gladdens our life far more than we are perhaps aware of."
"Well, papa," said Jennie, "I think the men ought to take just as much pains to get themselves up nicely after marriage as the women. I think there are such things as tumbled shirt-collars and frowzy hair and muddy shoes brought into the domestic sanctuary, as well as frayed silks and dirty ribbons."
"Certainly," I said; "but you know we are the natural Hottentot, and you are the missionaries who are to keep from degenerating; we are the clumsy, old, blind Vulcan, and you the fair Cytherea, the bearers of the magic cestus, and therefore it is to you that this head more particularly belongs.
"Now I maintain that in family-life there should be an effort not only to be neat and decent in the arrangement of our person, but to be also what the French call coquette,—or to put it in plain English, there should be an endeavor to make ourselves look handsome in the eyes of our dearest friends.
"Many worthy women, who would not for the world be found wanting in the matter of personal neatness, seem some how to have the notion that any study of the arts of personal beauty in family-life is unmatronly; they buy their clothes with simple reference to economy, an have them made up without any question of becomingness; and hence marriage sometimes transforms a charming, trim, tripping young lady into a waddling matron whose every-day toilette suggests only the idea of a feather-bed tied round with a string. For my part, I do not believe that the summary banishment of the Graces from the domestic circle as soon as the first baby makes its appearance is at all conducive to domestic affection. Nor do I think that there is any need of so doing. These housewives are in danger, like other saints, of falling into the error of neglecting the body through too much thoughtfulness for others and too little themselves. If a woman ever had any attractiveness; let her try and keep it, setting it down as one of her domestic talents. As for my erring brothers firm who violate the domestic sanctuary by tousled hair, tumbled linen, and muddy shoes, I deliver them over to Miss Jennie without benefit of clergy.
"My second head is, that there should in family-life the same delicacy in the avoidance of disagreeable topics that characterizes the intercourse of refined society among strangers.
"I do not think that it makes family-life more sincere, or any more honest, to have the members of a domestic circle feel a freedom to blurt out in each other's faces, without thought or care, all the disagreeable things that may occur to them: as, for example, 'How horridly you look this morning! What's the matter with you?'—'Is there a pimple coming on your nose? or what is that spot?'—'What made you buy such a dreadfully unbecoming dress? It sets like a witch! Who cut it?'—'What makes you wear that pair of old shoes?'—'Holloa, Bess! is that your party-rig? I should think you were going out for a walking advertisement of a flower-store!'—Observations of this kind between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or intimate friends, do not indicate sincerity, but obtuseness; and the person who remarks on the pimple on your nose is in many cases just as apt to deceive you as the most accomplished Frenchwoman who avoids disagreeable topics in your presence.
"Many families seem to think that it is a proof of family union and good-nature that they can pick each other to pieces, joke on each other's feelings and infirmities, and treat each other with a general tally-ho-ing rudeness without any offence or ill-feeling. If there is a limping sister, there is a never-failing supply of jokes on 'Dot-and-go-one'; and so with other defects and peculiarities of mind or manners. Now the perfect good-nature and mutual confidence which allow all this liberty are certainly admirable; but the liberty itself is far from making home-life interesting or agreeable.