Guest Blog – Upon Visiting, By ‘A Lady’

Well, not so much ‘guest’ as article trouvé. Having a houseful this weekend ourselves, and being on the receiving end of hospitality so recently too, I was interested to come across this instructional piece in an old magazine. (Date not given, but suspect circa 1910.)

Upon Visiting, By ‘A Lady’

Despite every erroneous assertion to the contrary, there can be no lubrication more refreshingly efficacious to an enlightened perspective upon one’s home than the gay and varied undertakings necessitated in the joyful accomodating of weekending guests.

Only an idiot-woman, a dolt, a whore or an imbecile, with a mind afflicted from its low birth by a lifetime of toil and labour in the tiresome pursuit of the provision of some scant crumbs laid upon the dismal table for her children, the fathers of whom eschew all reasonable attempts at identification, even unto the extent of knowing their own minds, and least of all the consequences, obligations and lurid fates of the products of their deceitful loins, so much so that they remain, these ‘fathers’, a mystery as great as is the very purpose of their ever having existed, would assume complete and encyclopedic understanding of the workings of their domicile when the abode in question is to be viewed anew through the eyes of a welcomed visitor.

Such is the position ‘A Lady’ finds herself in, as she busies about her rooms and spaces, directing instructions wherever she goes, her upper limbs a whirring blur as they indicate changes, corrections and improvements to be executed here – here – and here! How her eyes flash and glisten as if like the lamps they too were rubbed and polished, as they, both eyes and shining lamps, hasten over every surface and rest a while in pride upon the gleaming table leg, the newel post, and her husband’s hand she tolerates a moment’s rest upon its burnished knob.

For there is nothing quite like seeing one’s home through the eyes of another, and only a cheap and heavily-sullied whore would indulge in the impudence and imprudence of any opposing notion. The total cow.