Attentive service,
well-ordered dinners, brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers
in the house--these material details, which had come to seem the
extension of his wife's personality, the inevitable result of her
nearness, were as agreeable to him after five years of marriage as
in the first surprise of his introduction to them. Mrs. Nimick had
kept house jerkily and vociferously; Ella performed the same task
silently and imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of the
latter method. Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large
means, the household, under Mrs. Mornway's guidance, took on an air
of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating
to her sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar.
There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses
between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on
lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of
the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually increasing
scale of expense.
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