"This damn'd sticky stuff!" and will tell the wife that he wonders she
didn't paint herself and the children with it while she was about it.
She will reply, in an exasperatingly quiet tone of voice, that she
does like that. Perhaps he will say next, that she did not warn him
against it, and tell him what an idiot he was making of himself,
spoiling the whole house with his foolish fads. Each one will persist
that it was the other one who first suggested the absurdity, and they
will sit up in bed and quarrel about it every night for a month.

The children having acquired a taste for smudging the concoction
about, and there being nothing else left untouched in the house, will
try to enamel the cat; and then there will be bloodshed, and broken
windows, and spoiled infants, and sorrows and yells. The smell of the
paint will make everybody ill; and the servants will give notice.
Tradesmen's boys will lean up against places that are not dry and get
their clothes enameled and claim compensation. And the baby will suck
the paint off its cradle and have fits.

But the person that will suffer most will, of course, be the eldest
daughter's young man. The eldest daughter's young man is always
unfortunate. He means well, and he tries hard. His great ambition is
to make the family love him. But fate is ever against him, and he
only succeeds in gaining their undisguised contempt. The fact of his
being "gone" on their Emily is, of itself, naturally sufficient to
stamp him as an imbecile in the eyes of Emily's brothers and sisters.
The father finds him slow, and thinks the girl might have done better;
while the best that his future mother-in-law (his sole supporter) can
say for him is, that he seems steady.

There is only one thing that prompts the family to tolerate him, and