-a girl doesn't want to come down out of the style she
has always lived in."

I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom
would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.

But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and
we all went to see Bill in his new house, splendidly lighted up and
complete from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he
was; but that was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was
concerned. The running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys,
and making informal calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as
likely as if Bill had lodged in the Tuileries.

Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort
of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood and show her
principles, and was as different from her former self as your
careworn, mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten.
Not but that Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a
good, true womanly one, and was loving and obliging; but still she
was one of the desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of
women whose very blood, as they grow older, is devoured with
anxiety, and she came of a race of women in whom housekeeping was
more than an art or a science,--it was, so to speak, a religion.
Sophie's mother, aunts, and grandmothers, for nameless generations
back, were known and celebrated housekeepers. They might have been
genuine descendants of the inhabitants of that Hollandic town of
Broeck, celebrated by Washington Irving, where the cows' tails are
kept tied up with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the
fire-wood are painted white. He relates how a celebrated preacher,
visiting this town, found it impossible to draw these housewives from
their earthly views and employments, until he took to preaching on the
neatness of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its walls
and the polish of its golden pavement, when the faces of all the
housewives were set Zionward at once.

Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough
when a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished
house, where the articles are not too expensive to be reasonably
renewed as time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a
cataract of splendid furniture is heaped upon her care,--when splendid
crystals cut into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and
moth and rust stand ev