The Thoughtless Thoughts of Carisabel (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill Douse IF I wanted to conceal my real life, temperament, or opinions from certain discriminating individuals, I would not let them into my house. The house is more revealing than the conversation or any single act, or, for that matter, than any number of acts. One may assimilate a character until, as far as the outer circle is concerned, she may be that character. Knowing her as a member of the same literary club, as one of the committee board, or even through meeting her at country houses, I may judge my acquaintance to be large- minded, generous, hospitable, deeply cultured; or I may, from similar opportunities, decide that she is the opposite of all these qualities. But a woman's appearance in all semi-public functions is illusory. Enter the front door, step into the room where she lives or where she would have you think she lives, and you come upon the real person, and that without one word from her. " But," says the sceptic, " you forget that a woman's home is not always the expression of herself.On the contrary, it is the expression of his mother's taste, or first wife's taste, or of the taste of her young, crude life, which she has long outgrown. And oftener still it is a simple expression of impotence, of bald and hideous poverty, which must exist with bare walls and pine tables and chairs. There is more pathos," adds the carper?who, had she lived in the eighteenth century, would be described as a person of sensibility?" there is more pathos in a faded photograph of the Sistine Madonna than in the finest steel engraving that hangs on these walls." And all of this is true and would deprive me of the wind that is supposed to waft this communication to your consideration, did she who addresses you mean that taste is a revelation of the mind or soul. Taste, afte...