Or, better still, Shakespeare. He was constantly to and
fro between London and Stratford. It would not have been so very
much out of his way. 'The room where Shakespeare slept!' Why, it's
a new idea. Nobody ever seems to have thought of Shakespeare. There
is the four-post bedstead. Your mother never liked it. She will
insist, it harbours things. We might hang the wall with scenes from
his plays, and have a bust of the old gentleman himself over the
door. If I'm left alone and not worried, I'll probably end by
believing that he really did sleep there."
"What about cupboards?" suggested Dick. "The Little Mother will
clamour for cupboards."
It is unexplainable, the average woman's passion for cupboards. In
heaven, her first request, I am sure, is always, "Can I have a
cupboard?" She would keep her husband and children in cupboards if
she had her way: that would be her idea of the perfect home,
everybody wrapped up with a piece of camphor in his or her own proper
cupboard. I knew a woman once who was happy--for a woman. She lived
in a house with twenty-nine cupboards: I think it must have been
built by a woman. They were spacious cupboards, many of them, with
doors in no way different from other doors. Visitors would wish each
other good-night and disappear with their candles into cupboards,
staggering out backwards the next moment, looking scared. One poor
gentleman, this woman's husband told me, having to go downstairs
again for something he had forgotten, and unable on his return to
strike anything else but cupboards, lost heart and finished up the
night in a cupboard.
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