Wanted: A Cook

My Letitia! It was indeed a proud and glowing moment when I slipped the little golden circlet on her fair, slim, girlish finger, and realized that she was assuredly mine. We were so eminently suited to each other—both young, enthusiastic, and unspotted from the world. We had our own pet theories, and long before marriage we had communed on that favorite, misunderstood topic—the sanctity of the home.
Letitia was exceedingly well-read, and the polish upon her education shone. It was no mere thin veneer, to be worn off by a too brutal contact with the rough edges of the world. It was an ingrained polish. She adored the classics. Other girls would sit down and pore over the Sarah-Jane romances of the hour. My Letitia liked Virgil. In French she was fearfully familiar with Molière and Racine. In German she coquetted with Schiller in the most delightful manner. She knew most of the students' readings of Shakespeare. In fact, she fascinated me by her arch refinement.
[Pg 2]
We were both great sticklers for refinement. We pitied the poor silly things who knew how to sew and cook. Refinement—we were both certain of it—was the cultivation of the gloriously useless. We despised the abominably useful. It was so sordid. We felt convinced that our ""home"" could be conducted upon suave and easy lines, without abandoning even one of our theories. Letitia told me that ""home"" was the Anglo-Saxon ham, and I was so much in love with her, that I didn't mind in the least. In fact, I hinted that I had suspected as much. How could ""home"" be anything else but Anglo-Saxon?
My little girl had been ""finished"" in Paris, at a select, and pleasingly dismal, pension in the Avenue du Roule. I, myself, had taken a B. A. at Oxford. Yet we were triumphantly patriotic Americans. We returned to these shores absolutely convinced that they were beyond criticism. After all, people only go abroad in order that they may realize the inferiority of Europe. They never go for a ""good time,"" or for mere frivolous amusement. The great armies of Americans in London and Paris are there simply because they prefer America and want that fact brought home to them. If you don't believe me, ask them. Nail them down to their patriotism.
However, both Letitia and I grudgingly admitted[Pg 3] that in England home life did seem a bit more potent than on this side.
""It naturally would,"" said Letitia, ""because you see 'home' is really an Anglo-Saxon idea.""
But we were going to have a home of our own in the very midst of seething New York. The mere notion of a vulgar, degrading ""boarding-house"" was detestable to us, while as for the ""apartment hotel,"" where you sat at dinner in your best clothes with a crowd of unsympathetic strangers, we sniffed at the bare suggestion. We wanted a little refuge, tiny yet dainty, where we could be alone to live our lives. ""To live our lives"" was one of Letitia's expressions. She abstracted it unconsciously, I believe, from Ibsen. A chaste and cherishable resort, where of an evening my wife could read The Iliad in the original, and I, in a becoming smoking-jacket and velvet slippers, could work at my Lives of Great Men, was what we clamored to possess. And possess it we fully intended to do.
I may add that Letitia also believed in the ""new thought."" She was of the opinion that you could will anything you wanted. She doted on sitting still, and sending out telepathic waves from her cunning little brain, and I loved to look at her telepathing. She was at her prettiest.
[Pg 4]
Aunt Julia Dinsmore, Letitia's only relative, and a sedate old lady with drab ideas, mentioned something about the ""servant question"" as she listened to our domestic rhapsodies. She suggested to us that there must be some satisfactory reason to explain the lack of well-appointed homes in New York. Americans liked comfort just as well as other people, said she. Did we suppose that they were uncomfortable because they preferred discomfort? And again she referred to the ""servant question.""
The ""servant question""! How we laughed! Letitia nudged me under the table and arched her eyebrows. She turned to Aunt Julia and quoted one of Shakespeare's most beautiful passages:
""How well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!""
It is one of the many charming things in As You Like It. Aunt Julia said that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Perhaps it hadn't. In fact, as I think it over now, I can't quite see its relevancy. Yet what mattered relevancy? It was a treat to listen to Letitia when she quoted.
""Your Shakespeare will die when your cook comes in,"" said Aunt Julia, and she laughed. People are so fond of laughing at their own epigrams. It is[Pg 5] most irritating—just as though the utterance of this perverted form of philosophy were a relief.