'You are doing fairly well at it thus far,' said Martha dryly. 'What's the next step in your argument, Honoria?'
'Since our capacity is limited, and since to glut ourselves beyond it burdens and degrades, clearly the thing for each individual with intelligence to do is to find out where, for him, lies the golden point beyond which riches turns to the poverty of burden. When even the wise and earnest Adelaides get their houses too big and don't know what is the matter, it is time to formulate the principles of First Aid to the Prosperous. I believe the point from which the women of the comfortable classes should attack the problem of a saner living is this doctrine of limitation and selection, and that we should attack it first of all in our homes.
'Now, we human beings really do something to our immediate material surroundings which I can best describe as charging them with our personality. With the revolution of the days, personality accumulates in the things we handle and love and live with, much as electricity gathers upon the accumulator of a static machine with the revolution of the plates. This idea has always been popular with the poets and artists, but people who advance it in everyday life always do so apologetically, with the air of saying, "I know this is slightly fantastic, but doesn't it seem true?" Yet most housekeepers know its utter truth. I never doubted from the time I consciously began to care for old furniture, old rugs, old china--all the beautiful cast-offs of vanished lives--that a vast part of their charm was atmosphere, something imparted to them by the affection of those forgotten ones and now inhering, for the perceptive vision, in their very substance. The craftsman of those elder days is not the only creator of the beauty that has come down to us. Whoever has loved another's work has thereby added something to it. Is it not so? And I, in my turn, ought to be beautifying my belongings for those who come after me.'
Grace and Martha nodded readily enough, for this doctrine needs no long expounding to any woman who has lived her way into her material possessions, and distilled atmosphere from them for the comfort of her household. She knows what she has done, and knows, though she says little about it, that this business of turning lifeless into living things is one of her important natural functions.