They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequently
charming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or that
they would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, as
willingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much more
perspective than children, and their reading and their talk about reading
seem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunrise
and the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.
In fine, the American house as it is, the American household, is what the
American woman makes it and wills it to be, whether she wishes it to be
so or not; for I often find that the American woman wills things that she
in no wise wishes. What the normal New York house is, however, I had
great difficulty in getting Mrs. Makely to tell me, for, as she said
quite frankly, she could not imagine my not knowing. She asked me if I
really wanted her to begin at the beginning, and, when I said that I did,
she took a little more time to laugh at the idea, and then she said, "I
suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a
block?"
"Yes, I think that is what I mean," I said.
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