Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

sat in a back room adjoining the kitchen. The worthy woman, visiting a sister-housewife, was scandalized at learning that she, her husband and six children actually used the parlors “every day and Sunday, too,” and ate habitually in a dining-room “where there was an elegant Brussels carpet on the floor.” “My dear Mrs. Blank!” cried the wealthy economist, “do you expect to have all this and heaven, too?” “I expect to enjoy heaven the more for having made the best of the Father’s gifts to me here,” answered the matron of advanced ideas. Ideas, which I record with devout gratification, are fast relegating to a dusty and dishonored past, the “best room” of farmhouse and town mansion never opened except for visitors. With it is going the basement sitting-room, “low” in every sense of the word, which used to be thought good enough for the family. Expensive furniture, kept with real china and solid silver for “occasions”—that is, when appearances must be kept up before comparative strangers and acquaintances for whom, taken as individuals, the appearance-worshipers care less than nothing; fine clothes, worn above mean undergarments; sounding phrases aired, like the reserve of linen sheets, for company use—have more influence upon character than we are willing to believe. It is well to put the best foot foremost. It is better to have both feet decently shod and alike serviceable. Each of us knows plenty of people who have company tones, company smiles, company phraseology, company opinions—_un_wisely kept for show. One and all, singly and collectively, they mean to imply something which the wearers thereof are not. Their “appearances” are social electroplating, moral veneering. Slipshod at home and every day; well-groomed abroad and in the sight of those to whom it makes not an atom of difference how the hypocrites look or act,—“home devils and street angels,” as plain-spoken critics style them,—such is the great host of those who keep up appearances because they have not souls above shams, whose dusters and mops never visit the insides of burnished cups and platters. Verily they have their reward, but the prizes are