J. E. Panton

“ If you are a Londoner, on no account be persuaded by artistic accounts of country delights to leave your beloved pavements and the exquisite freedom of a town life and surroundings: and if you are born and have lived among cabbages and roses—if you love the country, and can interest yourself mildly in the continual changes that are going on around you in your neighbours’ houses and the cottages round about—remain there; and be thankful for tastes which are innocent if they are circumscribed, and often result in a far nobler life than that made up mostly from excitement and dissipation ”

“ No amount of decoration can embellish walls decorated with the hopes and joys of our youth, and one’s first playing at Motherhood; no other paper and paint give us the idea, or remind us as do the old papers and paint, of a thousand and one things no one can possibly want to forget; not even the miseries endured during serious illness, the anxieties turned into joy, or may be deepened into dreadful gloom by death itself, should be forgotten ”

“ At first, therefore, in any new house you have not only to adapt yourself and your furniture to it, but you have by your individuality to imprint yourself on the very fabric itself.
The last owner’s individuality fades at once; I have seen few empty houses that do not look precisely like something dead: the body is there, but the spirit is absent. And there is a blank awful chill about such a house that penetrates one’s very soul and depresses one in an extraordinary way ”

“ I never go into my own rooms, or the many rooms I have helped to decorate, without feeling that, whatever else may be their faults, they certainly cannot be called gloomy. They are all bright and cheerful; and I defy anyone to be miserable long, unless, of course, some real misfortune has occurred, in one of my rooms in the green serge abode. A misfitting dress would be as dreadful a sorrow as a broken arm, a disappointment about an entertainment as serious as an illness or loss of money! ”

“ Death is a dreadful thing because of its silence, its separation. Yet if we meet it patiently—if we believe our dead are still within reach—we can bear it, more especially if we do our best to carry out their wishes, and do not, the moment they are gone, begin to reverse all their ideas and plans, and to forget them as speedily as may be; while, when our own time comes, we can face it bravely, feeling we are setting a good example, and leaving behind us nothing to pain or embarrass anyone, nothing but a bright remembrance, a good record, that may sooner or later be of use to others after us. ”

“ I have always felt myself, unsentimental creature though I am, that a house absorbs some of one’s own personality: that the very walls we warm with our breathing, living selves, and among which we spend our lives, and allow ourselves to be ourselves without any company veneer, must in some measure become impregnated by our vitality. ”

“ Money is poured out like water on carpets that are nightmares, and on papers that are as absolutely meaningless as they are ugly, and the despair of anyone who is called in, as I am constantly, to mitigate the horrors of some gigantic monument of bad taste and lavish expenditure. ”

“ Never, however, be persuaded to give a garden-party trusting to tennis alone. There can be nothing more dreary than such an entertainment; it is like an at-home, where nothing but talk is provided. I would never heap on amusements out of doors or have music without stopping in doors, but I should always provide it in such a way that it serves as a pleasant reason for the gathering. An in-door at-home with music can never be a success if the seats are put in rows, and people are forced to sit stiffly close together ”

“ I have known a girl in her zeal for beauty make her mother so abjectly miserable by removing a round table, once the centre of the scattered houseful of boys and girls, and by ruthlessly disposing of clumsy and hideous furniture, made precious by memories of those who have gone into the land of shadows, that I am compelled at times to allow sentiment to sway me and to say, Consider first whether a thing has associations before, in one’s anxiety for beauty, one does away with it. ”

“ But all the same, it must be a hardened heart indeed that can contemplate an empty nursery and have no other thoughts than how best to decorate or use the room for a totally different purpose. There is a peculiar serrement de cœur, which, once experienced, can never be forgotten, when we enter a room made sacred to us by a thousand dreams and romances—a thousand dreads and fears we have never spoken of to any soul on earth, and have to consider how best we can alter it to another purpose. ”

“ Some may even have married, and others may be trying their wings by some short flights from the home that will always be theirs, even if they do not care to return to it. But, in any case, they are no longer the dear little mites whose tiny ailments kept us awake at night, whose clothes and education were our unceasing care, and who found their heaven in our presence, believing honestly and thankfully that all they had came from us, and that we were without a flaw, as omnipotent as we were faultless. ”

“ Were I called upon to turn nurse I could undoubtedly keep a room neat, smooth a pillow, and fold a sheet over properly; but I stand by in amaze and watch a friend of mine who has never been trained, but is a born nurse, who knows exactly how to lift her patient, when and how to give beef-tea and medicine, and who does easily and without effort what I cannot do at all, try as hard as I may to follow her excellent example. She may be anxious, she never shows it in the least; she may be tired to death, she does not look it ”

“ I have never yet come across anyone who was perfectly satisfied with his or her belongings; certainly I have never met anyone who had not bitter complaint to make about the special locality he or she inhabited, and yet who did not ruffle up their feathers the moment any stranger found fault with it. But a neighbourhood is like a house, and requires locally knowing; and if we are for ever changing our neighbourhood, we can never feel at home anywhere. ”

“ There can be nothing more extinct on this earth than that dear old nursery, closed nearly twenty years ago and utterly swept away, but I can never think of it without becoming young again—without being the eldest of that small flock and worshipped as only five small boys can worship a London cousin much older than themselves, who yet could enter into all their games and excursions with the zest of a girl who has never tried living in the country, and sees only the poetical side of it ”

“ Strive as we may, death waits for us all, and our carefully trained household falls apart and drifts away; our furniture wears out, our carefully amassed hoards are turned over and parted among our successors; some one else takes our house, and obliterates with his personality the last traces of ours ”

“ I have seen pennies played for which begat the taste for gambling for much larger sums; and I have never seen a house where gambling was allowed truly prosper, or be anything save the residence of those whose ideas and hopes were centred in this world only, and never rose above the mere ‘society’ existence, than which nothing can be more despicable and awful. ”

“ And now comes the great subject of nursing. I was much amused the other day to see an indignant article from someone who abused the present generation of mothers because they did not nurse their children themselves in cases of infection, and because their first idea in an emergency was to send for a nurse. Now I maintain that that is the very wisest thing anyone can do. A mother, as a rule, is the worst person in the world to nurse her own child; her fearful anxiety makes her nervous and communicates itself to the patient, who ought never to know that anyone is the least anxious about him. ”

“ Is there any misery like the misery of a girl who is dying to dance, who loves the exercise for its own sake, and who has to sit out on a bench, her feet impatiently tapping the floor, and her little heart ready to break with disappointment, while she sees married women, who ought to know better, and who ought never to dance at all as long as a girl is sitting out, prancing all about the place{139} and caring nothing for the poor young things whose day it is? ”

“ As decorators, governesses, and spoilers of canvas, they are undoubtedly not wanted, but they are required badly for simple domestic work, which is, none of it, half as hard as unlimited tennis, dancing all night, or rowing: not any of it half as unpleasant as is living on the begrudged charity of some relation, who wants all his hard-earned savings for his own children, or as degrading as is marrying the first man who asks them, and who can give them some sort of a home, for whom they have not the smallest respect—the very smallest amount of affection. ”

“ I do hope that, whatever else happens, the daughters of the household may never be sent away to schools, or urged at a high school to overwork their brains and go in for those wretched competitive examinations. I am no advocate for the higher education of women, for votes for women, for anything which shall take them out of the sheltered home atmosphere, where women alone can breathe comfortably and live properly, and force them into the arena of life ”

“ I confess that I begin my task with just a little diffidence, and a little misgiving, too, and feel just a wee bit as sad over the beginning of this little volume as I know my young couples must feel when, no longer quite as young as they were, they turn their backs on that dear little first home, and take up their abode in the newer, far more convenient habitation, welcomed so joyfully by the children, who declare that now, and now only, they will have room in which to breathe! ”

“ Then, when the curtain falls, when the hands part which have held each other so fondly, so faithfully, all through the journey, the worst parts of which have been gilded by the unfailing love which is God’s best gift, the one who goes can go boldly into the darkness, content to leave all to that Higher Power who has helped them so gallantly all through the struggle, while the one who stays knows that the link still binds them together, and will draw them some day back to each other again. ”

“ It sounds absurd to say that noise can kill anyone, but noise can; a sudden shock can undoubtedly snap the thread of life, while noise constantly wearing on the brain can do endless harm, especially to those who are predisposed to notice and resent continually unpleasant sounds. And now I want to give a hint to many among us who are abjectly miserable because they fancy they have some incurable complaint, and yet have not the sense or courage to really go to a good doctor and learn what is the matter, or indeed whether there is anything the matter at all. ”

“ I have lived a certain number of years, and I have had large opportunities of observation, and I am certain of what I am saying, that the truest marriages are those which are framed on respect as well as love, and that those women are the happiest who can implicitly trust and believe in the men to whom they have given themselves in some measure body and soul ”

“ In every library and, indeed, in every house, there should be a list of the books in each room, and whenever a book is added the name thereof should be written down. I speak feelingly, if a little bitterly, on the subject, for no one has lent more books than I have, and no one has been more ruthlessly robbed; for people who would be absolutely incapable of depriving one of a pin, lose and forget to return my books, and at last I have come to the conclusion that I will never lend another; books are cheap enough, goodness knows, and libraries swarm ”

“ It is not pleasant to partake of sticky black cakes baked in the dolls’-house pans, to sit on the cold stairs in the dark looking on at a spirited representation of a magic-lantern, the slides of which we know by heart, and we may endure agonies over the hundredth representation of the usual charade, neither may we feel profound interest in the School Magazine ”

“ To make such a dance a success, the floor must be perfect, a band of from three to five performers engaged, and people must be thoroughly well introduced to each other, and, if possible, no girl must be seen sitting out without a valiant struggle on the part of the hostess to prevent such a sad occurrence by finding her a partner. I cannot countenance or believe in dances, or, in fact, any social gathering, where there are no introductions; it is simply an excuse for laziness on the part of the hostess, which all too often condemns her guests to a great deal of misery and dulness. ”

“ Surely, surely the husband’s protection comes in there more than ever; while for those lucky women who only want to fulfil their destiny and make a home, the husband of course takes his right position at once, and is guardian, bread-winner, and head in a way that Nature intended him to be, and that all real women want him to be. The few who clamour for another arrangement don’t understand the subject at all, and are as ridiculous as they are abnormal and few in number, and therefore need not be considered in the least. There is, therefore, no doubt that women should marry if they can ”

“ The ball-dresses are the garments which try a girl more than anything, the tulle skirts and pretty flounces, which cost so much, getting so soon spoiled and messed; and I think the stock of the first season’s dresses must be helped considerably by the parents, else will the poor girl feel herself worse dressed than anyone else; and that is a small misery that should never be allowed if in any measure it can be avoided. The years from eighteen to twenty-one are undoubtedly the most joyous of any a woman ever has. ”

“ Indeed, blue serge should be the only wear, as far as young people are concerned, with flannels for boys. I remember how wretched we used to be over our light print and muslin frocks; in consequence of which I have always taken care our children should never have anything that they had to think about on the shore. Half our pleasure used to be spoiled by the idea that we should have to pay for it by being scolded by our governess for the sandy, wet garments, inseparable from any real play by the fascinating sea. ”