Wanted: A Cook Domestic Dialogues

My Letitia! It was indeed a proud and glowing moment when I slipped the little golden circlet on her fair, slim, girlish finger, and realized that she was assuredly mine. We were so eminently suited to each other--both young, enthusiastic, and unspotted from the world. We had our own pet theories, and long before marriage we had communed on that favorite, misunderstood topic--the sanctity of the home.

Letitia was exceedingly well-read, and the polish upon her education shone. It was no mere thin veneer, to be worn off by a too brutal contact with the rough edges of the world. It was an ingrained polish. She adored the classics. Other girls would sit down and pore over the Sarah-Jane romances of the hour. My Letitia liked Virgil. In French she was fearfully familiar with Molière and Racine. In German she coquetted with Schiller in the most delightful manner. She knew most of the students' readings of Shakespeare. In fact, she fascinated me by her arch refinement.

We were both great sticklers for refinement. We pitied the poor silly things who knew how to sew and cook. Refinement--we were both certain of it--was the cultivation of the gloriously useless. We despised the abominably useful. It was so sordid. We felt convinced that our "home" could be conducted upon suave and easy lines, without abandoning even one of our theories. Letitia told me that "home" was the Anglo-Saxon ham, and I was so much in love with her, that I didn't mind in the least. In fact, I hinted that I had suspected as much. How could "home" be anything else but Anglo-Saxon?

My little girl had been "finished" in Paris, at a select, and pleasingly dismal, pension in the Avenue du Roule. I, myself, had taken a B. A. at Oxford. Yet we were triumphantly patriotic Americans. We returned to these shores absolutely convinced that they were beyond criticism. After all, people only go abroad in order that they may realize the inferiority of Europe. They never go for a "good time," or for mere frivolous amusement. The great armies of Americans in London and Paris are there simply because they prefer America and want that fact brought home to them. If you don't believe me, ask them. Nail them down to their patriotism.

However, both Letitia and I grudgingly admitted that in England home life did seem a bit more potent than on this side.

"It naturally would," said Letitia, "because you see 'home' is really an Anglo-Saxon idea."

But we were going to have a home of our own in the very midst of seething New York. The mere notion of a vulgar, degrading "boarding-house" was detestable to us, while as for the "apartment hotel," where you sat at dinner in your best clothes with a crowd of unsympathetic strangers, we sniffed at the bare suggestion. We wanted a little refuge, tiny yet dainty, where we could be alone to live our lives. "To live our lives" was one of Letitia's expressions. She abstracted it unconsciously, I believe, from Ibsen. A chaste and cherishable resort, where of an evening my wife could read The Iliad in the original, and I, in a becoming smoking-jacket and velvet slippers, could work at my Lives of Great Men, was what we clamored to possess. And possess it we fully intended to do.

I may add that Letitia also believed in the "new thought." She was of the opinion that you could will anything you wanted. She doted on sitting still, and sending out telepathic waves from her cunning little brain, and I loved to look at her telepathing. She was at her prettiest.

Aunt Julia Dinsmore, Letitia's only relative, and a sedate old lady with drab ideas, mentioned something about the "servant question" as she listened to our domestic rhapsodies. She suggested to us that there must be some satisfactory reason to explain the lack of well-appointed homes in New York. Americans liked comfort just as well as other people, said she. Did we suppose that they were uncomfortable because they preferred discomfort? And again she referred to the "servant question."

The "servant question"! How we laughed! Letitia nudged me under the table and arched her eyebrows. She turned to Aunt Julia and quoted one of Shakespeare's most beautiful passages:

"How well in thee appears The constant service of the antique world, When service sweat for duty, not for meed!"

It is one of the many charming things in As You Like It. Aunt Julia said that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Perhaps it hadn't. In fact, as I think it over now, I can't quite see its relevancy. Yet what mattered relevancy? It was a treat to listen to Letitia when she quoted.

"Your Shakespeare will die when your cook comes in," said Aunt Julia, and she laughed. People are so fond of laughing at their own epigrams. It is most irritating--just as though the utterance of this perverted form of philosophy were a relief.

"You dear silly old thing!" exclaimed Letitia to her aunt, "we shall not worry. We don't read the comic papers. Americans believe all the wretched jokes, dished up for them, to be founded on fact. Americans believe anything. They have no time to think for themselves. Have they, Archie?"

All I could reply was: "No." I should like to have been pungent and clever, but somehow or other, I never can follow Letitia. She generally appeals to me with a deft query, destined to color her own delightful train of thought, and I have nothing better to say than "no"--or occasionally "yes."

After that, Aunt Julia dropped the "servant question," as she called it. The "servant question"! As though there could be such a question! How could refined and educated people elect to permit the mere matter of domestic drudgery to be a "question"? Art might be a question. Science was certainly a question. But to allude to the handmaiden, who opens your front door, or to the person who Marylands your terrapin, as a "question" was too ludicrous. It was making mountains out of molehills. Ah! Letitia and I were for the glorious mountains, with their sun-kissed peaks and their exultant elevation.

We were neither of us freighted with that detestable thing dubbed a "sense of humor." Thank goodness for that! A sense of humor is a handicap in the world's race. People afflicted with it seem to spend their time laughing at their friends, scoffing at serious situations, and extracting spurious merriment from the gravity and dignity of life. We both believed that a sense of humor was unrefined. Comic story-tellers, comic poets, comic critics--how we loathed them! They were parasites on the face of things, giving you stones when you craved bread--furnishing nasty, sickly ridicule in lieu of delicate, intellectual analysis. Thank goodness, that both Letitia and I had been spared the curse of a "sense of humor." We had been educated beyond it.

Aunt Julia, as I said, was henceforth silent--or comparatively silent--on her banal, squalid "servant question." But she was rampant and interfering again when we selected the pretty little apartment--in a beautiful neighborhood--that was to be our home--Letitia's and mine! We took it without a question, there being nothing that we wanted to know. It was not one of those American institutions in which, to get from the drawing-room to the dining-room, you were forced to walk through the bedrooms, no matter who happened to be in them, asleep, or dressing. It had a "private hall," and each room possessed a window. Why each room shouldn't possess a window, I can't explain, but windows in up-to-date apartments are a luxury, and not a necessity. I dare say that they are very old-fashioned, but they are one of the last remnants of old fashion to which I cling.

It was a small apartment with "six rooms and bath"--very cozy, and quite light and cheerful without furniture. After we had seen our dainty "belongings" moved in, we were bound to admit that some people might say that it all looked "stuffy." Letitia didn't think so; nor did I. Much we cared!

Still, it was quite remarkable what a difference furniture made. It really seemed to be in the way. The drawing-room was almost blocked up with its chairs and sofas, what-nots, and ottomans. It had seemed quite a spacious apartment when in its natural state. One would have thought that it mutely rebelled at the indignity of furniture. Yet one must furnish!

The only thing to do in our drawing-room was to sit down. It was quite comfortable sitting down. It seemed like refuge to get to a chair--out of harm's way. When up and doing, you had to dodge and to steer yourself. We often went there before we were married, just to get used to the position of the furniture. In front of the fireplace--where there would never be any fire, as everything was steam-heated--we placed the tiger-rug, with the real tiger-head, that Aunt Julia gave us. It was rather dark by the fireplace, as a bookcase, a what-not, a dear little tête-à-tête chair and a "cosy corner" were in its vicinity and we always fell over the tiger's head. It was most amusing at first. I laughed when it brought Letitia down. Letitia laughed when she saw me prone. But one tires so quickly of innocent pleasure! The last time we visited the apartment before the gorgeous day when it literally became "ours," I fell over the tiger-head, and--it palled. For the first time it didn't seem so funny. I am glad to say that Letitia laughed just the same, her mind being more ingenuous than mine.

In the dining-room, too, there was a wealth of furniture. It was such a cheerful room when we first saw it, but when curtained and upholstered, it was necessary to switch on the electric light in order to see where the table was. Of course, this didn't matter at all. It was merely a new experience and deliciously odd. Still, we both agreed that if we preferred air and light to material, bodily comfort, our "home" was infinitely brighter unfurnished. As a matter of fact, the simplest necessities of domestic life were encumbrances. We had to ponder over an extra chair. The disposal of a small footstool called for a mathematical mind. As for the table, it had--like most other tables--four legs, but three of them were ridiculously in the way. They seemed like abnormal growths.

We were delighted at all this innovation. We prattled about our "home" by the hour. These--or rather, this--might be the ancestral halls of our great-great-grandchildren, though at present it seemed destined for one generation at a time--and a small generation, too. There was scarcely room for even an ancestor, and I couldn't help feeling thankful that ancestors were not usual in New York.

The bedrooms surprised us. They were called bedrooms, because nobody had yet thought out any other name for them. We were both loud in praise of their coziness. They were simply full of coziness. There was no room for anything else. Furnished with ledges or bunks as on board ship, they would have been most spacious and agreeable. With beds in them they bulged. Letitia admitted this, when I called her attention to it. She laughed and quoted Ben Jonson's memorable words: "I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie a little further to make thee a room." And, as usual, I kissed her. Her splendid thoughts were independent of mere space. They rose above and superior to close modernity. Thank goodness, again, for the lack of a sense of humor! With it, I might have said things about Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont, at which the groundlings, would, perchance, have smiled. The humorists, so-called, would sell their souls for a laugh.