that is the reflection that he is going to take Emily away from them.

On that understanding they put up with him.

The eldest daughter's young man, in this particular case, will, you
may depend upon it, choose that exact moment when the baby's life is
hovering in the balance, and the cook is waiting for her wages with
her box in the hall, and a coal-heaver is at the front door with a
policeman, making a row about the damage to his trousers, to come in,
smiling, with a specimen pot of some new high art,
squashed-tomato-shade enamel paint, and suggest that they should try
it on the old man's pipe.

Then Emily will go off into hysterics, and Emily's male progenitor
will firmly but quietly lead that ill-starred yet true-hearted young
man to the public side of the garden-gate; and the engagement will be
"off."

Too much of anything is a mistake, as the man said when his wife
presented him with four new healthy children in one day. We should
practice moderation in all matters. A little enamel paint would have
been good. They might have enameled the house inside and out, and
have left the furniture alone. Or they might have colored the
furniture, and let the house be. But an entirely and completely
enameled home--a home, such as enamel-paint manufacturers love to
picture on their advertisements, over which the yearning eye wanders
in vain, seeking one single square inch of un-enameled matter--is, I
am convinced, a mistake. It may be a home that, as the testimonials
assure us, will easily wash. It may be an "artistic" home; but the
average man is not yet educated up to the appreciation of it. The