at when little Josephine first
entered the apartment she reached out her tiny hands in rapture and
sought to pluck the beautiful flowers. Adah, too, is delighted with
this floral design; the rose is her favorite flower, and by a charming
coincidence it happens to be also the favorite flower of Adah's friend
Maria--of course you remember Maria; married Johnnie Richardson, and
lives at St. Joe, Missouri. So, you see, there are several tender
sentiments attaching Adah to that rose-bedecked apartment.

And yet (will you believe it?) there are those who do not at all
approve of the wall-paper in which I and little Josephine and Adah (to
say nothing of Maria) take so great delight. Some of these people have
been ill-mannered enough to laugh aloud and long when they beheld the
impassioned hue of the covering of the walls in my study! There was
one person (I forbear mention of her name) who seriously said she
thought we 'd be afraid to let little Josephine sleep in that
rose-garlanded room; that the glaring colors would be likely to give
the dear child the "willies." I do not know what the "willies" are,
but I do know that little Josephine sleeps well, eats well, and is
happy, and this is all that we could hope for in one of her tender
years.

Now while I cannot do otherwise than defend the choices in wall-papers
which Alice and Adah have made, I distinctly recognize and I regret two
very unpleasant facts: first, that by not complying with their advice
upon the subject we have grievously offended a number of our neighbors,
and, second, that Alice and Adah are prepared to set down in the list
of their active and malignant foes every woman who presumes to
disparage either by word or by look the wall-paper they have picked out
as most pleasing to their tastes.

XXV

AT LAST WE ENTER OUR HOUSE

The detail of hardware fixtures did not enter into our original
calculations. This was very stupid of us, so everybody else
said--everybody, of course, who had been through the ordeal of building
a house. It is surprising how soon one who has had this experience
forgets that before he had that experience he was as ignorant and as
unsuspecting a body as could be imagined.

I suspect that after all it is a good thing for humanity that all
people do not have to go through with what Alice and I have experienced
the last four months. Otherwise the world would be filled with
distrust, for I can conceive of nothing else so lik