The Matrimonial Bureau by Carolyn Wells

Author:Carolyn Wells [Carolyn Wells]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: F
ISBN: 9788726894905
Publisher: SAGA Egmont
Published: 2021-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIV

Here’s a small trifle of wives.

—Merchant of Venice, ii, 2.

Lillian’s studio was peculiarly fitted for confidences. It was away up in the top of a house which had been constructed in the time when gingerbread formed a part of the architectural impulse of Central New York. Still, up in the attic there had been left an unfinished room—garret, with rafters and other things dear to the heart of those who were born in Central New York in the middle seventies. This room the young woman had adapted to her own uses. She had impressed the men from the Whitfield Planing Mill and Agricultural Works, and she had directed them to construct a ceiling of matched lumber—though she did not know what matched lumber meant.

After it was finished she discovered that it was simply a ceiling of boards closely fitted together, and that by no possibility could the boards be said to match—so far as her eye for color could discover. Still, she was satisfied, for she had covered the whole affair with a coat of burlap, and over this she had put a coat of paint—dark green, with splashes of gold in it—and when it was done she sat down and thought it all out.

“They thought it was matched lumber,” she said. “I have made it match.”

That, in effect, was the attitude which Lillian Hastings, she of the artistic temperament, held toward life.

This point of view had been questioned by Jean, but Helen understood it. “It’s this way,” said she, as they discussed it for the thousandth time. “Very often Lillian’s lumber doesn’t match, but she covers it up with a bit of decorative drapery and is perfectly satisfied.”

“Yes,” said Lillian, “but the decoration, if it is of my own choosing, pleases me so much that I forget the unmatchedness of the lumber.”

“Just in the same way, I suppose,” said Jean, “that you have forgotten the ugliness of that picture which you have so cleverly covered with that square of Turkish embroidery.”

“Exactly that. As it is, I forget that the ugliness is behind, and see only the beautiful. To me the ugliness is not there.”

“No,” said Helen, “I know it. Now to me the ugliness is not only there, but is all the more visible to me from the fact that I try to cover it up.”

“That’s foolishness,” said Jean. “There’s no sense in seeing ugly things because they’re covered up; but then, there’s no sense in having them there, anyway. If a thing is ugly, why not take it away, or else go somewhere else yourself?”

Lillian went about the work of the studio thoughtfully. “There are some uglinesses,” she said, presently, “that one cannot get away from. If they are there, and are put there by those who put things there for us in the beginning—then why not either accept them or get away from them, or—cover them up? The system is complicated. Not all can be escaped. Not all can be accepted—but all of them can be

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