“Well,” said Marianne, “unless one has a great deal of money, it seems to me that the investment in these pretty fragilities is rather a poor one.”

“Yet,” said I, “the principle of beauty is never so captivating as when it presides over the hour of daily meals.  I would have the room where they are served one of the pleasantest and sunniest in the house.  I would have its coloring cheerful, and there should be companionable pictures and engravings on the walls.  Of all things, I dislike a room that seems to be kept like a restaurant, merely to eat in.  I like to see in a dining-room something that betokens a pleasant sitting-room at other hours.  I like there some books, a comfortable sofa or lounge, and all that should make it cozy and inviting.  The custom in some families, of adopting for the daily meals one of the two parlors which a city-house furnishes, has often seemed to me a particularly happy one.  You take your meals, then, in an agreeable place, surrounded by the little agreeable arrangements of your daily sitting-room; and after the meal, if the lady of the house does the honors of her own pretty china herself, the office may be a pleasant and social one.

“But in regard to your table-service I have my advice at hand.  Invest in pretty table-linen, in delicate napkins, have your vase of flowers, and be guided by the eye of taste in the choice and arrangement of even the every-day table-articles, and have no ugly things when you can have pretty ones by taking a little thought.  If you are sore tempted with lovely china and crystal, too fragile to last, too expensive to be renewed, turn away to a print-shop and comfort yourself by hanging around the walls of your dining-room beauty that will not break or fade, that will meet your eye from year to year, though plates, tumblers, and tea-sets successively vanish.  There is my advice for you, Marianne.”

At the same time, let me say, in parenthesis, that my wife, whose weakness is china, informed me that night, when we were by ourselves, that she was ordering secretly a tea-set as a bridal gift for Marianne, every cup of which was to be exquisitely painted with the wild-flowers of America, from designs of her own,—­a thing, by-the-by, that can now be very nicely executed in our country.  “It will last her all her life,” she said, “and always be such a pleasure to look at,—­and a pretty tea-table is such a pretty sight!” So spoke Mrs. Crowfield, “unweaned from china by a thousand falls.”  She spoke even with tears in her eyes.  Verily, these women are harps of a thousand strings!

But to return to my subject.

“Finally and lastly,” I said, “in my analysis and explication of the agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the crowning grace,—­their homeliness.  By homeliness I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt to be used, but the air that is given to a room by being really at home in it.  Not the most skilful arrangement can impart this charm.