Then, too, the position of the two rooms close together, and generally a little way removed from the rest of the house, though not at the top, I beg, makes them a most admirable place for an invalid to retire to; there is always a chance of illness--aye, even serious illness--as one gets on in life, and all sorts of disagreeable things remind one that one is not immortal; and though, as a rule, houses are built emphatically to live in, and neither to be ill nor die in--though, despite the architects, both these unpleasant matters are possible--one can generally in a large house manage that the nurseries shall be close together and quiet; therefore, they should be kept apart for our own use. We could be ill most comfortably in the night nursery, and convalescent in the day nursery, which could, however, be used for our nurse did we require one, and the cheerful pretty papers and the thoughts that would be inseparable from these rooms would alike help us to bear our woes, while we could have nurse to talk to and to ‘do for us’ as no one else could--no one who did not know us thoroughly, and, having seen us in sickness and in health, in adversity and prosperity, knows exactly what we can bear and how to manage us best.
Thinking over everything, then, considering carefully what the nurseries have been and what they may be, I do most seriously beg all my contemporaries to pause a very long time before they lay a ruthless hand on what was once as sacred as a shrine. No amount of decoration can embellish walls decorated with the hopes and joys of our youth, and one’s first playing at Motherhood; no other paper and paint give us the idea, or remind us as do the old papers and paint, of a thousand and one things no one can possibly want to forget; not even the miseries endured during serious illness, the anxieties turned into joy, or may be deepened into dreadful gloom by death itself, should be forgotten; aye, a thousand times should they be remembered if this be the case, and, though this is an impatient age when no one wants to think, and when death is treated so lightly that people are in society and deepest black at the same time, and when all are so impatient of the sorrow death brings with it, that ‘no one stays at home except the corpse,’ I trust I shall not number many of them among my readers, or indeed anyone who cannot and will not thankfully remember their past, and as they grow old, Darby and Joan together, will not spare time to look back gladly and happily to days which were better, perhaps, than the present days of feeble steps and darkened lights, but which are no less happy if Edwin and Angelina are still hand int hand and heart to heart, and have proved for themselves the absolute truth that where marriage is begun in love, continued in love, and ended in love, it can never be anything save success, and that anyone who calls it a failure must know absolutely nothing whatever about it. To such a couple as this, the nurseries must always be sacred places, and they will be as reluctant as I am to do away with them. I think, therefore, I may take it for granted that unless absolutely pressed for room we shall retain our nurseries, keeping them fresh and bright and nice in case we are ill, or in case we have our grandchildren to see us, or in case we have small visitors, who, being provided with suitable rooms, are nothing but a pleasure to us, when otherwise they might be nothing except a trouble and a nuisance.