Angelina, when she really must move therefore, must remember to think over all these details.
I envy everyone myself who has a really inherited house--a house which has absorbed the family atmosphere for centuries, that has never been passed from hand to hand and from family to family until it has no recollection of who built it or what it was built for; a house for which it is an intense and real pleasure to plan improvements, to deck as one would deck a child of one’s own, knowing that what we spent on it or did for it would benefit and please not only ourselves but those who are to come after us. Yes; hopeless Radical as I am in everything else, I am Conservative indeed in the house I would have if I could; but in these days of progress, when most people grow rich, and many only use their dwelling-place as a shelter, and don’t think of it as a home, I am constantly being pained to see retired city men and lawyers--the two classes which become really wealthy, taking over the delightful places which once owned ‘county families,’ and ruining the society round with their ostentation and the ridiculous airs only found in suburban places where ‘society’ so-called consists of ‘twopence three-farthings looking down on twopence,’ while the poor houses themselves are ruined too by utterly inappropriate furnishing and by decorations suitable only for an ordinary ‘mansion,’ furnished by giving _carte blanche_ to some enterprising and advertising tradesman.
Should Angelina have made her first home in the family dwelling-place, she will never have to learn what moving house really means. She can allow her roots to sink as deeply as she likes into the kindly soil, and she can make it all as charming as she will, because she will know that all she does will only benefit her own; but as there are indeed few nowadays who can contemplate this (for even the absorbers of the old places round London never think of the generation behind them, and often and often cut up the land for eligible building sites, with as little compunction as one cuts up a cake at a school-feast: only taking care it shall go as far as it can), we need not dwell on this aspect of the case, but on the one that should be the motive of this chapter, namely, moving house.