Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Sincerity in the Home

by Don Marquis

SINCERITY IN THE HOME

SINCERITY should be the keynote of a life, don’t you think?

Sincerity — beauty — use — these are my watchwords.

I heard such an interesting talk on sincerity the other evening. I belong to a Little Group of Serious Thinkers who are taking up sincerity in all its phases this week.

We discussed Sincerity in the Home.

So many people's homes, you know, do not represent anything personal.

The sincere home should be full of purpose and personality—decorations, rugs, ornaments, hangings and all, you know.

The home shows the soul.

So I’m doing over our house from top to bottom, putting personality into it.

I’ve a room I call the Ancestors' Room.

You know, when one has ancestors, one's ancestral traditions keep one up to the mark, somehow. You know what I mean—blood will tell, and all that. Ancestors help one to be sincere.

So I've furnished my Ancestors' Room with all sorts of things to remind me of the dear dead-and-gone people I get my traditions from.

Heirlooms and portraits and things, you know.

Of course, all our own family heirlooms were destroyed in a fire years ago.

So I had to go to the antique shops for the portraits and furniture and chairs and snuff boxes and swords and fire irons and things.

I bought the loveliest old spinet—truly, a find!

I can sit down to it and imagine I am my own grandmother's grandmother, you know.

And it's wonderful to sit among those old heirlooms and feel the sense of my ancestors' personalities throbbing and pulsing all about me!

I feel, when I sit at the spinet, that my personality is truly represented by my surroundings at last.

I feel that I have at last achieved sincerity in the midst of my traditions.

And there’s a picture of the loveliest old lady… old-fashioned costume, you know, and all that… and the hair dressed in a very peculiar way….

Mamma says it’s a made-up picture—not really an antique at all—but I can just feel the personality vibrating from it.

I got it at a bargain, too.

I call her—the picture, you know—after an ancestress of mine who came to this country in the old Colonial days. With William the Conqueror, you know—or maybe it was William Penn. But it couldn't have been William Penn, could it? For she went to New Jersey—Orange, N. J. Was it William of Orange? More than likely…

Anyhow, I call the picture after her—Lady Clarissa, I call it. She married a commoner, as so many of the early settlers of this country did.

When I sit at the spinet and look at Lady Clarissa I often wonder what people do without family traditions.

And it's such a comfort to know I'm in a room that really represents my personality!