the whole house in order, and shut all
the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets
out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories
about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their
houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest
night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept
looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,--not a book, not a
paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being in sight; the piano
shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up,
all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow
into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I
have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour
before I can get at anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah is standing
tiptoe at the door, ready to whip everything back and lock up again. A
fellow can't be social, or take any comfort in showing his books and
pictures that way. Then there's our great, light dining-room, with its
sunny south windows,--Aunt Zeruah got us out of that early in April,
because she said the flies would speck the frescoes and get into the
china-closet, and we have been eating in a little dingy den, with a
window looking out on a back alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says
that now the dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is
such a care off Sophie's mind that I ought to be willing to eat down
cellar to the end of the chapter. Now, you see, Chris, my position is
a delicate one, because Sophie's folks all agree that, if there is
anything in creation that is ignorant and dreadful and mustn't be
allowed his way anywhere, it's 'a man.' Why, you'd think, to hear Aunt
Zeruah talk, that we were all like bulls in a china-shop, ready to
toss and tear and rend, if we are not kept down cellar and chained;
and she worries Sophie, and Sophie's mother comes in and worries, and
if I try to get anything done differently Sophie cries, and says she
don't know what to do, and so I give it up. Now, if I want to ask a
few of our set in sociably to dinner, I can't have them where we eat
down cellar,--oh, that would never do! Aunt Zeruah and Sophie's mother
and the whole family would think the family honor was forever ruined
and undone. We mustn't ask them unless we open the dining-room, and
have out all the best china, and get the silver home from the bank;
and if we do t