move--may not be able at once to analyze the odd heartache he feels in
surveying the apartments fitted up by the upholsterer--or to tell you
why they become no longer a tri-syllabled word, but "our rooms,"
within a day after wife and daughters have taken possession of them.
The honest fellow cannot see but that the furniture is the same, and
each article standing in the same place--but the new atmosphere "which
is the old," greets him upon the threshold, and steals into his heart
before he has fairly entered. Anybody could have shaken the stiffness
out of that portière, and put a low, shaded lamp under the picture he
likes best, and broken up the formal symmetry of the bric-a-brac that
reminded him, although he did not dare confess it, of a china shop,
and set a slender vaselet with one big ragged golden globe of a
chrysanthemum in it here, and over there a bowl of long-stemmed
roses--(his favorite Bon Silenes, too). But what hireling, O blind and
dear John! would have left a bit of fancy work with the needle
sticking in it, and scissors lying upon it, on the table in library or
smoking room, and put the song you always ask for at twilight upon the
open piano, and, just where you would choose to cast yourself down to
listen, your especial Sleepy Hollow of chair or lounge with the
slumber robe worked last Christmas by loving fingers thrown invitingly
across it?

What professional art could make the vestibule of your house--a rented
cottage, maybe--the gateway to another, and a purer, higher, happier
sphere than the world you shut out with the closing of the front
door? You would never get upon so much as bowing terms with your
better self but for that front door and the latch key which lets you
into the hall brightened by loving smiles, made merry by welcoming
voices.