There was no glare anywhere, though high [42] windows, in accord with the high ceilings, were on three sides of the house. Sylvestre was forever the advocate of the dim light. She said that not only did it mean peace and rest for the eyes, but evoked poetry. This as to interiors, but in God’s great outdoors values are different, though she confessed to delight in a dark, rainy day.
“Most people,” she said, “think there is no such recuperative force as all the light that can be obtained; and this may be true medically and for continuous work — but not for relaxation or refreshment. To the nervous, to the weary, a dim light is the peace that descends — especially in summer. Try it! First stand as long as you can the light pouring in. Then pull the shades half down or more, so no longer there is an overhead light, hardly a horizontal one, if you are doing nothing onerous, and watch the change in your feelings, your nerves. Why, it is often something like a miracle. Fatigue, anxiety, strain, disappear utterly, and bliss comes instead.”
In winter, from the gilt cornices of these high windows depended damask curtains over ecru linen lace in Arabian pattern, while long gilt pierglasses, harmonizing with the cornices, in every room upstairs and down reigned supreme. The Baltimore lady was responsible for these, saying she always wanted to know exactly how she looked to others as well as herself to the last comb, pin and tie. In this respect she was most unlike her [43] granddaughter who, though so amazingly resembling her in appearance, seldom took the trouble to look in the glass, and thereby was now and then criticised for something like untidiness.
“Well, we can’t have everything to please us,” she once said. “To be looking at yourself all the time and puttering over your face not only takes up so many precious minutes but seems to me vulgar. Anyhow, I wear the right colors, I keep myself mended, and I’m clean.”
Indeed she was clean, she believed in cold water, and hot too, to the last degree. The number of bathrooms in the house, due almost entirely to her wishes, were no slight expense.
ex Helen Bartlett Bridgman (1863-1935), The Last Passion (New York: Cloister Publishing Company, 1925) : 43
U Michigan copy/scan (via google books) : link
U California copy/scan (one of two via hathitrust) : link
