“Well,” said I, “can’t you have some little family sitting-room, where you can make yourselves cozy?”

“Not a bit of it.  Sophie and Aunt Zeruah have fixed their throne up in our bedroom, and there they sit all day long, except at calling-hours, and then Sophie dresses herself and comes down.  Aunt Zeruah insists upon it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night.  I’ll bet they could in our house.  From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—­not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being, in sight.  The piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked.  Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour before I can get at anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah is standing tiptoe at the door, ready to whip everything back and lock up again.  A fellow can’t be social, or take any comfort in showing his books and pictures that way.  Then there’s our great, light dining-room, with its sunny south windows,—­Aunt Zeruah got us out of that early in April, because she said the flies would speck the frescos and get into the china-closet, and we have been eating in a little dingy den, with a window looking out on a back-alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says that now the dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is such a care off Sophy’s mind that I ought to be willing to eat down-cellar to the end of the chapter.  Now, you see, Chris, my position is a delicate one, because Sophie’s folks all agree, that, if there is anything in creation that is ignorant and dreadful and mustn’t be allowed his way anywhere, it’s ’a man’.  Why, you’d think, to hear Aunt Zeruah talk, that we were all like bulls in a china-shop, ready to toss and tear and rend, if we are not kept down-cellar and chained; and she worries Sophie, and Sophie’s mother comes in and worries, and if I try to get anything done differently, Sophie cries, and says she don’t know what to do, and so I give it up.  Now, if I want to ask a few of our set in sociably to dinner, I can’t have them where we eat down-cellar,—­oh, that would never do!  Aunt Zeruah and Sophie’s mother and the whole family would think the family-honor was forever ruined and undone.  We mustn’t ask them, unless we open the dining-room, and have out all the best china, and get the silver home from the bank; and if we do that, Aunt Zeruah doesn’t sleep for a week beforehand, getting ready for it, and for a week after, getting things put away; and then she tells me, that, in Sophie’s delicate state, it really is abominable for me to increase her cares, and so I invite fellows to dine with me at Delmonico’s, and then Sophie cries, and Sophie’s mother says it doesn’t look respectable for a family-man to be dining at public places; but, hang it, a fellow wants a home somewhere!”