“I am—­in a certain degree,” I assented.

“We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves.  Once my wife and I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste and slavery of the thing.  We went to the storage warehouse and sent three or four vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer.  Some of the pieces we had not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and decide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts of rejoicing.  Tender and sacred associations!  We hadn’t had such light hearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europe indefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of our lives forever.  Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every one had been a pang.  All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again.”

“I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associations pretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage.  But the things that we have in daily use?”

“It is exactly the same with them.  Why should they be more to us than the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no particular pathos?  And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the anxiety she feels for them.  She is really much more precious, if she could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps up with moth-balls.  The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet not form the slightest attachment to the furniture.  Why should we have tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not with a thing we have hired?”

“I confess, I don’t know.  And do you really think we could liberate ourselves from our belongings if they didn’t belong to us?  Wouldn’t the eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them out for winter?”

“At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease.  When the Standard Household-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penalty for violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly of her ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical, whatever we say about the dressmaker’s bills; and the very futilities of putting away and taking out, that she now wears herself to a thread with, are founded in the instinct of saving.”

“But,” I asked, “wouldn’t our household belongings lose a good deal of character if they didn’t belong to us?  Wouldn’t our domestic interiors become dreadfully impersonal?”