The linoleum is the most conspicuous feature of the domestic establishment. It is impertinent, self-assertive, and loud. If you visit a house in which there is a linoleum, the thing rushes at you, and you see it even before the front door has been opened. Every minister who spends his afternoons in knocking at people's doors knows exactly what I mean. The very sound of the knock tells you a good deal. Such sounds are of three kinds. There is the echoing and reverberating knock that tells you of bare boards; there is the dead and sombre thud that tells of linoleum on the floor; and there is the softened and muffled tap that tells of a hall well carpeted. And so I say that the linoleum--if there be one--rushes at you, and you seem to see it even before the door has been opened. Perhaps it is this immodesty on its part that prevents your liking it. It is always with the coy, shy, modest things that we fall in love most readily.
But however that may be, the fact remains. Since this queer old world of ours began, men and women have fallen in love with all sorts of strange things; but there is no record of any man or woman yet having really fallen in love with a roll of linoleum. Of everything else about the house you get very fond. I can understand a man shedding tears when his arm-chair has to go to the sale-room or the scrap-heap. Robert Louis Stevenson once told the story of his favourite chair until he moved his schoolboy audience to tears! And everybody knows how Dickens makes you laugh and cry at the drollery and pathos with which, in all his books, he invests chairs, tables, clocks, pictures, and every other article of furniture. I fancy I should feel life to be less worth living if I were deprived of some of the household odds and ends with which all my felicity seems to be mysteriously associated. But I cannot conceive of myself as yielding to even a momentary sensation of tenderness over the sale, destruction, or exchange of any of the linoleums. I feel perfectly certain that neither Stevenson nor Dickens would ever have felt an atom of sentiment concerning linoleum. Yet why? Few things about the house are more serviceable. I could point offhand to a hundred things no one of which has earned its right to a place in the home one-hundredth part as nobly as has the linoleum. Yet I am very fond of each of those hundred things, whilst I am not at all fond of the linoleum. I appreciate it, but I do not love it. So there it is! Said I not truly that love is never utilitarian? We grow fond of things because we grow fond of things; we never grow fond of things simply because they are of use to us.