Had these people been content to live in a house of eight rooms, and do their own work with the assistance of a woman to do the laundry and the heavier cooking, they would have, in all human probability, been a happy family. They were good-natured, good-looking, and with sufficient traces of good breeding to have made them attractive.
During the seven days that I remained with them I never got to my room, which was in the garret and shared by the cook, before nine o’clock at night. How I did work! I did everything from firing the furnace to running ribbons in the underwear of the marriageable daughter.
For upward of two years it had been the chief ambition of the family to marry off this eldest girl. When I came on the scene it had become, so they all thought, a vital necessity. And I, succumbing to the atmosphere around me, did my best to help along the match. The mother explained to me that if they could only announce the engagement of this daughter the maiden aunt, for whom she was named, would see to it that she had a proper wedding and also pay the family debts.
The idea that these three grown girls, the youngest being past eighteen, might work and earn their own living never seemed to enter their mother’s head. The fact that they did not work, did not know how to do anything more useful than to play tennis and golf, she proclaimed from the housetops. Sad to relate, it was the literal truth. So far as I could learn, neither of them had ever done so much as make a bed, dust a room, or mend a garment. I never knew them to pick up a magazine, a book, or a sofa-pillow, though they knew how to scatter them broadcast. No, indeed, it was beneath their dignity to do anything to keep their home comfortable or clean, yet they boasted of skill at tennis and their golf score.
What a silly un-American idea it is that knocking a ball across country is more ennobling than doing anything that tends to make a home comfortable and happy! Will anybody deny that it takes more sense to cook or serve a good dinner than it does to play a good game of golf? Now I am not decrying the game of golf. Indeed, it appeals to me as a very good way to get elderly and delicate persons, who take no interest in nature, to exercise in the fresh air.