eldest daughter's young man is always
unfortunate. He means well, and he tries hard. His great ambition is
to make the family love him. But fate is ever against him, and he only
succeeds in gaining their undisguised contempt. The fact of his being
"gone" on their Emily is, of itself, naturally sufficient to stamp him
as an imbecile in the eyes of Emily's brothers and sisters. The father
finds him slow, and thinks the girl might have done better; while the
best that his future mother-in-law (his sole supporter) can say for him
is, that he seems steady.

There is only one thing that prompts the family to tolerate him, and
that is the reflection that he is going to take Emily away from them.

On that understanding they put up with him.

The eldest daughter's young man, in this particular case, will, you
may depend upon it, choose that exact moment when the baby's life is
hovering in the balance, and the cook is waiting for her wages with
her box in the hall, and a coal-heaver is at the front door with a
policeman, making a row about the damage to his trousers, to come in,
smiling, with a specimen pot of some new high art, squashed-tomato-shade
enamel paint, and suggest that they should try it on the old man's pipe.

Then Emily will go off into hysterics, and Emily's male progenitor will
firmly but quietly lead that ill-starred yet true-hearted young man to
the public side of the garden-gate; and the engagement will be "off."

Too much of anything is a mistake, as the man said when his wife
presented him with four new healthy children in one day. We should
practice moderation in all matters. A little enamel paint would have
been good. They might have enameled the house inside and out, and have
left the furniture alone. Or they might have colored the furniture, and
let the house be. But an entirely and completely enameled home--a
home, such as enamel-paint manufacturers love to picture on their
advertisements, over which the yearning eye wanders in vain, seeking one
single square inch of un-enameled matter--is, I am convinced, a mistake.
It may be a home that, as the testimonials assure us, will easily wash.
It may be an "artistic" home; but the average man is not yet educated up
to the appreciation of it. The average man does not care for high art.
At a certain point, the average man gets sick of high art.

So, in these coming Utopias, in which out unhappy grandchildren will
have to drag out their colorless existence,