ould they be more to us than
the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no
particular pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly
not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the
anxiety she feels for them. She is really much more precious, if she
could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps
up with moth-balls. The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a
piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for
years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet
not form the slightest attachment to the furniture. Why should we have
tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not with
a thing we have hired?"

"I confess, I don't know. And do you really think we could liberate
ourselves from our belongings if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't the
eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them
out for winter?"

"At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it
would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease. When the Standard
Household-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penalty
for violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly of
her ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical,
whatever we say about the dressmaker's bills; and the very futilities of
putting away and taking out, that she now wears herself to a thread with,
are founded in the instinct of saving."

"But," I asked, "wouldn't our household belongings lose a good deal of
character if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't our domestic interiors
become dreadfully impersonal?"

"How many houses now have character-personality? Most people let the
different dealers choose for them, as it is. Why not let the Standard
Household-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am sure that either
would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the
few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves. In most
interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are
the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where
they are the result of design, they are worse. I see what you mean by
character and personality in them. You mean the sort of madness that let
itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has
since gone to make the junk-shops hi