CHAPTER XIII.
_JOHN'S BIRTHDAY_.
"My dear Lillie," quoth John one morning, "next week Wednesday is my birthday." "Is it?
How charming! What shall we do ?" "Well, Lillie, it has always been our custom--Grace's and mine--to give a grand _fete_ here to all our work-people.

We invite them all over _en masse_, and have the house and grounds all open, and devote ourselves to giving them a good time." Lillie's countenance fell.
"Now, really, John, how trying! what shall we do?
You don't really propose to bring all those low, dirty, little factory children in Spindlewood through our elegant new house?
Just look at that satin furniture, and think what it will be when a whole parcel of freckled, tow-headed, snubby-nosed children have eaten bread and butter and doughnuts over it! Now, John, there is reason in all things; _this_ house is not made for a missionary asylum." John, thus admonished, looked at his house, and was fain to admit that there was the usual amount of that good, selfish, hard grit--called common sense--in Lillie's remarks.
Rooms have their atmosphere, their necessities, their artistic proprieties.

Apartments _a la_ Louis Quatorze represent the ideas and the sympathies of a period when the rich lived by themselves in luxury, and the poor were trodden down in the gutter; when there was only aristocratic contempt and domination on one side, and servility and smothered curses on the other.

With the change of the apartments to the style of that past era, seemed to come its maxims and morals, as artistically indicated for its completeness.

So John walked up and down in his Louis Quinze _salon_, and into his Pompadour _boudoir_, and out again into the Louis Quatorze dining-rooms, and reflected.
He had had many reflections in those apartments before.