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Shadows and sunbeams: Being a second series of Fern leaves from Fanny's portfolio cover

Shadows and sunbeams: Being a second series of Fern leaves from Fanny's portfolio

Chapter 128: NANCY PRY’S SOLILOQUY.
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About This Book

A varied collection of short essays, sketches, and soliloquies mixes humor and sentiment to portray domestic and civic life. Vignettes range from rural scenes and bereavement to city routines and boarding-house experience, emphasizing financial dependence, household labor, and the social pressures on women. The pieces alternate pointed satire of fashion, clergy, and public manners with practical reflections on housekeeping, parenting, and charity, using anecdote and direct address to balance wit, moral observation, and sympathetic portraiture.

NANCY PRY’S SOLILOQUY.

I wonder if that is the bride over at that window? Poor thing, how I pity her! Every thing in her house so bran new and fresh and uncomfortable. Furniture smelling like a mahogany coffin; every thing set up spick and span in its place; not a picture awry; not a chair out of its orbit; not a finger mark on the window panes; not a thread on the carpet; not a curtain fold disarranged; china and porcelain set up in alphabetical order in the pantry; bureau drawers fit for a Quaker; no stockings to mend; no strings or buttons missing; no old rag-bags to hunt over; no dresses to re-flounce, or re-tuck, or re-fashionize; not even a hook or eye absent. Saucepans, pots, and kettles, fresh from the “furnishing house;” servants fresh; house as still as a cat-cornered mouse. Nothing stirring, nothing to do. Land of Canaan! I should think it would be a relief to her to hear the braying and roaring in Driesbach’s Menagerie.

Well, there’s one consolation; in all human probability, it is a state of things that won’t last long.