live up to them.

The tradesman who begins to acknowledge the probability that he will
become a rich citizen, and whose wife has "feelings" on the subject of
living as her neighbors do, takes the conventional step toward
asserting himself and gratifying her aspirations by moving into a
bigger house than that which has satisfied him up to now, and
furnishing it well--that is, smartly, according to the English
acceptance of the word.

Silks and moquette harmonize as well as calico and ingrain once did. A
three-story-and-a-half-with-a-high-stoop house, without a piano in the
back parlor, and a long mirror between the front parlor windows, would
be a forlorn contradiction of the genius of American progress. As flat
a denial would be the endeavor to live without what an old lady once
described to me as, a "pair of parlors." The stereotyped brace is
senseless and ugly, but one of the necessaries of life to our
ambitious housewife. She would scout as vulgar the homely cheerfulness
of the middle-class Englishman's single "parlor" where the table is
spread and the family receives visitors. Having saddled himself with a
house too big for his family, and stocked the showrooms with
plenishings so fine that the family are afraid to use them unless when
there is company, the prudent citizen satisfies the economic side of
him by making menials of wife and daughters without thought of the
opposing circumstance that he has practically endorsed their intention
to make fine ladies of themselves. Neither he nor the chief slave of
her own gentility, the wife, who will maintain her reputation for
"faculty" or perish in the attempt, has a suspicion that the strain to
make meet the ends of frugality and pretension, is palpably and
criminally absurd. By keeping up a certain appearance of affluence and