“Well, Lillie, it has always been our custom—­Grace’s and mine—­to give a grand fete here to all our work-people.  We invite them all over en masse, and have the house and grounds all open, and devote ourselves to giving them a good time.”

Lillie’s countenance fell.

“Now, really, John, how trying! what shall we do?  You don’t really propose to bring all those low, dirty, little factory children in Spindlewood through our elegant new house?  Just look at that satin furniture, and think what it will be when a whole parcel of freckled, tow-headed, snubby-nosed children have eaten bread and butter and doughnuts over it!  Now, John, there is reason in all things; this house is not made for a missionary asylum.”

John, thus admonished, looked at his house, and was fain to admit that there was the usual amount of that good, selfish, hard grit—­called common sense—­in Lillie’s remarks.

Rooms have their atmosphere, their necessities, their artistic proprieties.  Apartments a la Louis Quatorze represent the ideas and the sympathies of a period when the rich lived by themselves in luxury, and the poor were trodden down in the gutter; when there was only aristocratic contempt and domination on one side, and servility and smothered curses on the other.  With the change of the apartments to the style of that past era, seemed to come its maxims and morals, as artistically indicated for its completeness.  So John walked up and down in his Louis Quinze salon, and into his Pompadour boudoir, and out again into the Louis Quatorze dining-rooms, and reflected.  He had had many reflections in those apartments before.  Of all ill-adapted and unsuitable pieces of furniture in them, he had always felt himself the most unsuitable and ill-adapted.  He had never felt at home in them.  He never felt like lolling at ease on any of those elegant sofas, as of old he used to cast himself into the motherly arms of the great chintz one that filled the recess.  His Lillie, with her smart paraphernalia of hoops and puffs and ruffles and pinkings and bows, seemed a perfectly natural and indigenous production there; but he himself seemed always to be out of place.  His Lillie might have been any of Balzac’s charming duchesses, with their “thirty-seven thousand ways of saying ‘Yes;’” but, as to himself, he must have been taken for her steward or gardener, who had accidentally strayed in, and was fraying her satin surroundings with rough coats and heavy boots.  There was not, in fact, in all the reorganized house, a place where he felt himself to be at all the proper thing; nowhere where he could lounge, and read his newspaper, without a feeling of impropriety; nowhere that he could indulge in any of the slight Hottentot-isms wherein unrenewed male nature delights,—­without a feeling of rebuke.

John had not philosophized on the causes of this.  He knew, in a general and unconfessed way, that he was not comfortable in his new arrangements; but he supposed it was his own fault.  He had fallen into rusty, old-fashioned, bachelor ways; and, like other things that are not agreeable to the natural man, he supposed his trim, resplendent, genteel house was good for him, and that he ought to like it, and by grace should attain to liking it, if he only tried long enough.