At Home with the dines | Page 6

here. But
perhaps it was only Aubrey's expression of countenance which
changed.
"For instance, I want no chairs for show. Every spot intended to rest the
human frame in our house shall bring a sigh of relief from the weary
one who sinks into it. I have already started it by the couch I ordered
last week for your study. I went to the man who takes orders and said:
'Have you ever read "Trilby"?' And he said no, but his wife had when it
was the rage about five years ago. I had brought a copy on purpose, so I
read him that paragraph from the first chapter describing the studio.
Here it is: 'An immense divan spread itself in width and length and
delightful thickness just beneath the big north window, the business
window--a divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented
Englishmen could all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once,
without being in each other's way, and very often did!' He smiled and
said it made very agreeable reading, to which I replied that I wanted
one made just like it."
"What did he say?"
"Well, of course he argued. He wanted to make it a normal size. He
wanted to know the size of the doors it would have to go through, and I
told him it was for an apartment. As soon as he knew that he wanted to
make the lower part of cedar to store furs in for the winter. I said: 'No,
no! This is a luxury. There is to be nothing useful about it. I want the
whole inside given up to springs!' He said, 'Turkish?' and I said yes,
and put in two sets of them. At that he began to catch the spirit of the
thing and took an interest. We argued so over the size of it that finally I
told him to send out and measure the elevator and the door and the
room it was to go in and make it just as large as those spaces would
allow. So you'll have a divan ten by six. I wanted it bigger, but I
couldn't have got it through any front door."

"Why, won't it about fill that little room?" asked my husband, with a
trace of anxiety in his tone.
"Only about half-way. There's just room for a little table of books at
one end of the divan, and I'm going to have a movable electric lamp
with a ground-glass globe and a green shade to be good for the eyes.
Your pipe-rack will be on the wall over it. Then by squeezing a little
there will be just room for my writing-chair,--you know the one with
the desk on the arm and the little drawer for note-paper?"
Aubrey got up and came over to where I had my list, and Draper fell to
the floor unnoticed.
"I never heard anything sound so comfortable," he said. The Angel is
always appreciative, and, moreover, is never too absorbed or too tired
to express it fluently. That's one of the things which make it such a
pleasure to plan his comfort.
"Doesn't it sound winter evening-y and snowy outside?" I said.
"I can hear the wind howling," said the Angel. "What's the next item?"
"Well, now we come to a theory. Of course I have had no more
experience than you in buying furniture, but it stands to reason that
some of the things we buy now will be with us at death. Some furniture
stays by you like a murder. For instance, a dining-room table. I have
known some very rich people in my life, Aubrey, but I have seldom
seen any who grew rich gradually who had had the moral courage to
discard a dining-room table if it were even decently good. Have you
ever thought about that?"
"I can't say that I have, but it is fraught with possibility. 'The Ethics of
Household Furniture' would make good reading."
"Well, haven't you," I persisted, "in all seriousness, haven't you seen
some very handsome modern dining-rooms marred by a dinner-table
too good to throw away, which you were convinced the family had
begun housekeeping with?"

"Yes, I have!" cried Aubrey. "You are right, I have. I thought you were
jesting at first."
"Well, I am, sort of half-way. But the sort of dinner-table I want to buy
is no joke. It is one which will grace an apartment or a palace. We can
be proud of it even when we are rich. Yet it is not showy, or one which
will be too screamingly prominent. It is of carved oak with the value all
in the carving. It costs--" Here I whispered the price, for to us it was
almost a crime to think of it.
The