University of Virginia Library

(Letter from Eva Henderson to Isabelle Courtney.)

MY Dear Belle: Well, here we are, Harry and I,
all settled down to housekeeping quite like old
folks. All is about done but the last things,—those little
touches, and improvements, and alterations that go off into
airy perspective. I believe it was Carlyle that talked
about an “infinite shoe-black” whom all the world could
not quite satisfy so but that there would always be a
next thing in the distance. Well, perhaps it 's going to be
so in housekeeping, and I shall turn out an infinite housekeeper;
for I find this little, low-studded, unfashionable
home of ours, far off in a tabooed street, has kept all my
energies brisk and busy for a month past, and still there
are more worlds to conquer. Visions of certain brackets
and lambrequins that are to adorn my spare chamber
visit my pillow nightly, while Harry is placidly sleeping
the sleep of the just. I have been unable to attain to
them because I have been so busy with my parlor ivies
and my Ward's case of ferns, and some perfectly seraphic
hanging baskets, gorgeous with flowering nasturtiums
that are now blooming in my windows. There is a
dear little Quaker dove of a woman living in the next
house to ours who is a perfect witch at gardening—a
good kind of witch, you understand, one who could
make a broomstick bud and blossom if she undertook it
—and she has been my teacher and exemplar in these
matters. Her parlor is a perfect bower, a drab dove's
nest wreathed round with vines and all a-bloom with geraniums;

and mine is coming on to look just like it. So
you see all this has kept me ever so busy.

Then there are the family accounts to keep. You
may think that isn't much for our little concern, but you
would be amazed to find how much there is in it. You
see, I have all my life concerned myself only with figures
of speech and never gave a thought about figures of
arithmetic or troubled my head as to where money came
from, or went to; and when I married Harry I had a general
idea that we were going to live with delightful economy.
But it is astonishing how much all our simplicity
costs, after all. My account-book is giving me a world
of new ideas, and some pretty serious ones too.

Harry, you see, leaves every thing to me. He has
to be off to his office by seven o'clock every morning, and
I am head marshal of the commisariat department—committee
of one on supplies, and all that—and it takes up a
good deal of my time.

You would laugh, Belle, to see me with my matronly
airs and graces going my daily walk to the provision-store
at the corner, which is kept by a tall, black-browed
lugubrious man, with rough hair and a stiff stubby beard,
who surveys me with a severe gravity over the counter,
as if he wasn't sure that my designs were quite honest.

“Mr. Quackenboss,” I say, with my sweetest smile,
“have you any nice butter?”

He looks out of the window, drums on the counter,
and answers “Yes,” in a tone of great reserve.

“I should like to look at some,” I say, undiscouraged.

“It 's down cellar,” he replies, gloomily chewing a bit
of chip and casting sinister glances at me.

“Well,” I say, cheerfully, “shall I go down there and
look at it?”

“How much do you want?” he asks, suspiciously.

“That depends on how well I like it,” say I.

“I s'pose I could get up a cask,” he says in a ruminating
tone; and now he calls his partner, a cheerful, fat,
roly-poly little cockney Englishman, who flings his h's
round in the most generous and reckless style. His alert
manner seems to say that he would get up forty casks a
minute and throw them all at my feet, if it would give me
any pleasure.

So the butter-cask is got up and opened, and my
severe friend stands looking down on it and me as if he
would say, “This also is vanity.”

“I should like to taste it,” I say, “if I had something
to try it with.”

He scoops up a portion on his dirty thumbnail and
seems to hold it reflectively, as if a doubt was arising in
his mind of the propriety of this mode of offering it to
me.

And now my cockney friend interposes with a clean
knife. I taste the butter and find it excellent, and give a
generous order which delights his honest soul; and as he
weighs it out he throws in, gratis, the information that his
little woman has tried it, and he was sure I would like it,
for she is the tidiest little woman and the best judge of
butter; that they came from Yorkshire, where the pastures
round were so sweet with a-many violets and cowslips—
in fact, my little cockney friend strays off into a kind of
pastoral that makes the little grocery store quite poetic.

I call my two grocers familiarly Tragedy and Comedy,
and make Harry a good deal of fun by recounting my
adventures with them. I have many speculations about
Tragedy. He is a married man, as I learn, and I can't
help wondering what Mrs. Quackenboss thinks of him.
Does he ever shave—or does she kiss him in the
rough—or has she given up kissing him at all? How
did he act when he was in love?—if ever he was in love
—and what did he say to the lady to induce her to marry

him? How did he look when he did it? It really makes
me shudder to think of such a mournful ghoul coming
back to the domestic circle at night. I should think the
little “Quacks” would all run and hide. But a truce to
scandalizing my neighbor—he may be better than I am,
after all!

I ought to tell you that some of my essays in provisioning
my garrison might justly excite his contempt—they
have been rather appalling to my good Mary McArthur.
You know I had been used to seeing about a ten-pound
sirloin of beef on Papa's table, and the first day I went
into the shop I assumed an air of easy wisdom as if I had
been a housekeeper all my life, and ordered just such a
cut as I had seen Mamma get, with all sorts of vegetables
to match, and walked home with composed dignity.
When Mary saw it she threw up her hands and gave
an exclamation of horror—“Miss Eva!” she said, “when
will we get all this eaten up?” And verily that beef
pursued us through the week most like a ghost. We had
it hot, and we had it cold; we had it stewed and hashed,
and made soup of it; we sliced it and we minced it, and
I ate a great deal more than was good for me on purpose
to “save it.” Towards the close of the week Harry civilly
suggested (he never finds fault with anything I do, but
he merely suggested) whether it wouldn't be better to
have a little variety in our table arrangements; and then
I came out with the whole story, and we had a good
laugh together about it. Since then I have come down
to taking lessons of Mary, and I say to her, “How much
of this, and that, had I better get?” and between us we
make it go quite nicely.

Speaking of neighbors, my dear blessed Aunt Maria,
whom I suppose you remember, has almost broken
her heart about Papa's failing and my marrying Harry
and, finally, our coming to live on an unfashionable street

—which in her view is equal to falling out of heaven
into some very suspicious region of limbo. She almost
quarreled with us both because, having got married contrary
to her will, we would also insist on going to housekeeping
and having a whole house to ourselves on a back
street instead of having one little, stuffy room on the
back side of a fashionable boarding house. Well, I made
all up with her at last. If you will have your own way,
and persist in it, people have to make up with you. You
thus get to be like the sun and moon which, though they
often behave very inconveniently, you have to make the
best of; and so Aunt Maria has concluded to make the
best of Harry and me. It came about in this wise: I
went and sat with her the last time she had a sick headache,
and kissed her, and bathed her head, and told her I
wanted to be a good girl and did really love her, though
I couldn't always take her advice now I was a married
woman; and so we made it up.

But the trouble is that now she wants to show me
how to run this poor little unfashionable boat so as to
make a good show with the rest of them, and I don't
want to learn. It 's easier to keep out of the regatta.
My card-receiver is full of most desirable names of people
who have come in their fashionable carriages and
coupés, and they have “oh'd” and “ah'd” in my little
parlors, and declared they were “quite sweet,” and “so
odd,” and “so different, you know;” but, for all that, I
don't think I shall try to keep up all this gay circle of
acquaintances. Carriage-hire costs money; and when
paid for by the hour, one asks whether the acquaintances
are worth it. But there are some real noble-hearted
people that I mean to keep. The Van Astrachans, for
instance. Mrs. Van Astrachan is a solid lump of goodness
and motherliness, and that sweet Mrs. Harry Endicott
is most lovable. You remember Harry Endicott, I

suppose, and what a trump card he was thought to be
among the girls, one time when you were visiting us, and
afterwards all that scandal about him and that pretty
little Mrs. John Seymour? She is dead now, I hear, and
he has married this pretty Rose Ferguson, a friend of
hers; and since his wife has taken him in hand, he has
turned out to be a noble fellow. They live up on Madison
avenue quite handsomely. They are among the “real
folks” Mrs. Whitney tells about, and I think I must keep
them. The Elmores I don't care much for. They are a
frivolous, fast set, and what's the use? Sophie and her
husband, my old friend Wat Sydney, I keep mainly because
she won't give me up. She is one of the clinging
sort, and is devoted to me. They have a perfect palace
up by the park—it is quite a show-house, and is, I understand,
to be furnished by Harter. So, you see, it's like
a friendship between princess and peasant.

Now, I foresee future conflicts with Aunt Maria in all
these possibilities. She is a nice woman, and bent on
securing what she thinks my interest, but I can't help
seeing that she is somewhat

The success of my card-receiver delights her, and
not to improve such opportunities would be, in her view,
to bury one's talent in a napkin. Yet, after all, I differ.
I can't help seeing that intimacies between people with a
hundred thousand a year and people of our modest
means will be full of perplexities.

And then I say, Why not try to find all the neighborliness
I can on my own street? In a country village, one
finds a deal in one's neighbors, simply because one must.
They are there; they are all one has, and human nature
is always interesting, if one takes it right side out. Next
door is the gentle Quakeress I told you of. She is

nobody in the gay world, but as full of sweetness and
loving kindness as heart could desire. Then right across
the way are two antiquated old ladies, very old, very
precise, and very funny, who have come in state and
called on me; bringing with them the most lovely, tyrannical
little terrier, who behaved like a small-sized fiend
and shocked them dreadfully. I spy worlds of interest
in their company if once I can rub the stiffness out of
our acquaintance, and then I hope to get the run of the
delightfully queer old house.

Then there are our set—Jim Fellows, and Bolton,
and my sister Alice, and the girls—in and out all the time.
We sha'n't want for society. So if Aunt Maria puts me
up for a career in the gay world I shall hang heavy on
her hands.

I haven't much independence myself, but it is no
longer I, it is We. Eva Van Arsdel alone was anybody's
property; Mamma talked her one way, her sister Ida
another way, and Aunt Maria a third; and among them
all her own little way was hard to find. But now Harry
and I have formed a firm and compact We, which is a
fortress into which we retreat from all the world. I tell
them all, We don't think so, and We don't do so. Isn't
that nice? When will you come and see us?