Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/62

 48 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

the best advantage, and I will credit her with an astonishing faculty for making a dollar "tell." But there was such an expenditure ot time, and precious bodily and mental vitaUty, that my heart ached for her.

What do I care for an elaborately wrought table-cover after the South Ken- sington patterns, if, when evening comes, Laura is too tired to sit and play a game of chess with me? A squat Japanese tea-pot and Eastlake furniture in the dining-room, though comme iljaut, are no compensation for her tired face and nervous headache. How many nights has the dear, misguided child smiled a ghastly smile over the tea-tray, lelling me in such a pathetically enthusiastic way of a successful hunt in bric-a-brac shops, yet so worn and jaded she could not break bread with me !

O, temporal O, mores! when will China and Japan take back their own, and leave us the simple comforts and homely art of our forefathers ?

Well, so the story runs. During the last few years my experience has doubtless been undergone in a thousand homes, yet, it is none the less sad. I, in common with many another true-born American citizen, am obliged to sit in uncomfortable chairs, arrogant with rampant British lions in red flannel impaled on toweling. 1 rest my aching head on a tidy, where a melancholy white felt stork stands listlessly on one leg, amid brown velvet rushes, or one on which "conventional" dull oranges hang stiffly on dismal, cold, grey linen. Since it has grown to be the fashion to arrange one's rooms with the frank disorder one hitherto only expected to find in an artist's studio, 1 dare not go into the library in the dark, lest I knock over Venus de JMilo, or have a pass with Mercury. Even during the daytime my limbs are in peril, because Laura would have inlaid floors, and Persian rugs will slip under one's feet as well as "hooked" ones.

But why go on ? 'Tis too late for help. Michael Angelo's prophets stare reproachfully at me as 1 write. What can 1, an uncouth man, know of the delicate fancies of the bright Psyche, who, butterfly-like, has settled down by my side ? Yet a traitorous thought poisons my soul : she is shamming ! In her heart of hearts she is still a good Methodist, though she would exclaim indignantly were I so much as to hint that she was not born and bred a high-church Episcopalian. Her Dante club always sends her home cross, with a headache, though she tries to make me believe it "elevates" her. Poor little thing ! how she toils away at Huxley, Spencer, German, and china-painting ! How my heart yearns over her, as 1 see the smile on her pretty mouth fade away, her round cheeks grow hollow, and her fascinating ingenuousness giving place to meaningless cant on art, religion, and science !

Possibly you think 1 have greatly exaggerated the evil ; that so few hideous tidies, more or less, and a superficial course of German, are harmless enough, but this is not afl ; Laura thinks I do not care for art or " culture ;" that our tastes are sadly unlike, that 1 am not sympathetic. The necessary consequence is that we are drifting surely but slowly apart. I cannot be a brute and tell her that after all her labors that my house is not a home ; that it is not com- fortable ; that I caa find in it no rest for the sole of my foot j that after all has been said and done, it is far from being aesthetic. Nor can I be rude enough to say frankly that it is folly for her lo spend so much time "cuUivating" her mind.

Ah me ! my honest little wife is gone, and in her steady there is a nervous, tired, prematurely careworn woman, who lives in a whirl of silly gush over worthless tea-cups and modern thought. I hear her now talking with the children in her newly-acquired Boston tone, and with a startlingly new pro- nunciation. 'Jom is saying that he got his hands dirty playing marbles with, the Jones boys. She corrects him severely with, " Do not say dirty, Tom

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