Lydia’s presents filled our house.  All were Eastlake and in good taste, the colors sage-green, pumpkin-yellow and ginger-brown, dashed with splashes of peacock feathers and Japanese fans.  The vases were straddle-legged and pot-bellied Asiatic shapes.  Dragons in bronze and ivory, sticky-looking faience and glittering majolica, stood in the corners.  Silk embroideries representing the stork—­a scrawny bird with a scalp-lock at the back of its neck, looking like a mosquito when flying—­and porcelain landscapes out of drawing, like a child’s first attempts, peopled by individuals with the expression of having their hair pulled, hung ’twixt our dados and friezes.  Lydia’s young-lady friends gave her their works in oil or water-colors done in a fine, free-hand style that may one day form a school of its own.  Our Chicago girls are people of nous.  Their talk is “fluent as the flight of a swallow:”  their manners are delightful—­American manners must be excellent, so many Englishmen marry American girls.  Their playing makes us glad the seven poor strings of the old musicians have been multiplied to seven times seven:  no Chicago girl is a musician unless she has the masters at her finger-tips.  And they are readers too.  You would suppose, judging from the papers, that our Chicagoans are inordinately fond of reading about the indiscretions of rustic wives, and are given to a perusal of the news in startling headlines:  but such is not the fact.  We are great readers of the distinguished magazines and of first-rate books, and our taste for art is keen.  When we go abroad we don’t care so much for mountains and rivers—­they are like potatoes and pork to a man who is visiting:  we have them at home—­but we are after art.  Ruskin says no people can be great in art unless it lives among beautiful natural objects; which is hard on us Chicago folks.  If we had any mountainous or rocky tracts we should not live in them.  If we possessed a Mount Vesuvius we should use it for getting up bogus eruptions to draw tourists to our hotels, and we should tap the foot of the mountain to draw off the lava for our streets.

Lydia’s finery had a subduing effect upon me, who had bounded my aspirations to what was distinctly within my grasp—­namely, things

  Plain, but not sordid—­though not splendid, clean.

Lydia was an expert housekeeper.  “I love a little house that I can clean all over,” said she.  She would have liked a Roman villa made of polished marble, that could be scrubbed from top to bottom, or a house of the melted and dyed cobble-stones that some genius has promised to give us.  Her china-closet was a picture, with platters in rows and cups hanging on little brass hooks under the shelves.  Our whole house was exquisite, and became quite renowned for its elegance and charm.  Lydia’s exuberant vitality was attractive:  her relations and friends liked to come there.  Some of our friends were of the high, haughty, tone-y sort, which would have been well enough if we had not incurred debts in our housekeeping.