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<h2>INTERIOR DESPERATION</h2> It is easy nowadays to get advice on how to arrange your home. The Woman's Page in any newspaper will tell you just how your living-room ought to look, just how your hallway may be beautified, and just how your kitchen may be transformed into a scientific laboratory. Scores of books by experts on the subject undertake to instruct you how to change your home from a place to live in to a work of art. Realizing that my abode needed a little toning-up along modern æsthetic lines, I consulted a book called "The Dwelling Beautiful," which I had been informed would give me just the help I needed. "It is not necessary that your furniture, rugs, hangings, and pictures be expensive," says the author, reassuringly. "The only essential is that they be beautiful in themselves and in restful accord with each other." Pray, gentle writer, did you ever see my belongings? Did you ever see the marble-and-walnut[Pg 63] parlor table that Aunt Jessamine gave me; or the streakily-stained Mission piano, with mottled glass panels and gew-gawy candle-brackets, that my wife won in the guessing contest and is therefore inordinately proud of; or the case of stuffed birds which Uncle Lemuel left me in his will? How am I to make these things "beautiful in themselves and in restful accord with each other?" The truth is, none of our furnishings are gregarious. From the green rug whose acrid hue assaults every other color in the room, to the wonderfully and fearfully made "ornamental" lamp, each thing is what the advertisement writers would call "different". Rabid in their nonconformity, how am I to make a happy family of them? The main feud is between our heirlooms and our wedding presents—the former being atrocities in oak, walnut and plush of the Victorian era, and the latter, present-day garishnesses; so that the general effect might be likened to a colon: one period on top of another. The author of "The Dwelling Beautiful"[Pg 64] would probably suggest that I get rid of some of these incumbrances. The lamentable fact is that I can't. My relatives would disown me. For my whole family connection—not to mention my wife's (about which much might be said)—takes upon itself to police my belongings. Every visit of a relative, even the casual call of my most distant cousin, means a critical inspection, a careful stock-taking of heirlooms and wedding presents. A person who gives you anything as a wedding present never forgets it. His taste may be erratic, but his memory is inexorable. Because a thing happened to catch his fancy in an off-moment, it is anchored in your home forever. And the feeling of self-appreciation for his generosity, which he experiences whenever he beholds his gift in after years, prevents him from admitting, even to himself, that he was out of his mind when he bought it. Hence, you are doomed to be its perpetual curator, with the obligation to display it prominently, so that whenever he chooses to enter your house he may see it and claim it with his eye. An heirloom is still worse. Each one that[Pg 65] you have in your possession might have gone to somebody else, and that somebody else feels that he or she would have appreciated it more than you do. Nevertheless, for you to disburden yourself of a single heirloom by presenting it to the person who coveted it most, would be to precipitate a family crisis. Take, for instance, that case of stuffed birds. Every time Uncle Lemuel's daughter sees it she tells me how much it always meant to her, and how the old house seems empty without it. Yet whenever I offer to make her a present of it she bursts into tears, and sobs that her dear father wanted me to have it, because I had once told him I liked birds, and that therefore she would be the last person in the world to deprive me of it. So, along with all the rest of the harmony-killers, I am saddled for life with this ornithological incubus. It is true, as Cousin Ophelia says, that I like birds; but my fondness for them does not continue after they are defunct and stuffed; neither does it include owls, whether alive or dead, and there are no less than three owls in that cabinet—gloomy, dusty,[Pg 66] evil-looking fowls, their big yellow glass eyes wide open and staring. I'll wager they had their eyes closed when Uncle Lemuel shot them. He never was much of a sport. Be that as it may, these lugubrious specimens are on my hands. I kept them in the living-room till I couldn't stand them there any longer. (Strangers would ask me how I happened to take up taxidermy.) Then I removed them to the dining-room, where they promptly took away my appetite. Transferred subsequently to the nursery, they caused Mamma's Pet to go into convulsions of terror. I offered the cook an increase in wages if she would take the cursed things into her room; she threatened to leave. I made a pathetic appeal to my wife to take them into hers; she reminded me coolly that Uncle Lemuel was my uncle. Now they are in my room, in the corner where I used to keep my favorite chair. But something tells me that they may not endure there forever. I am a mild-dispositioned man, long-suffering, and tractable; but that cabinet of birds is too much. Some day you may see clouds of smoke pouring[Pg 67] out of my windows and fire-engines pulling up at my door. If you do, don't feel sorry for me or censure me. A burning need will be satisfied. It will be a case of sponsored combustion. <hr class="chap" /> [Pg 68] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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