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He pulled the piece of antiquity into the street, and with an uneasy expression, as if he knew before-hand what he had to expect, he tried and tugged at one of the door-handles.
What objects are generally manufactured from tucum? Would it surprise you to learn that English door-handles are commonly made out of coquilla nuts? that your wife's buttons are turned from the indurated fruit of the Tagua palm? and that the knobs of umbrellas grew originally in the remote depths of Guatemalan forests?
"But I should be a clean object," cried Minora, "and my house would not be full of accumulated dirt." We said nothing there was nothing to be said. "It must be a happy land, that England of yours," Irais remarked after a while with a sigh a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her mind of a land full of washerwomen and agile gentlemen darting at door-handles.
The upper part of the inner door is made of stained glass; the door-handles and bell-pulls are made of highly- polished electro-plate; and a handsome flight of stone steps, with elegant bronze balustrades, leads up to the porch. The entrance-halls are seldom large, but the staircases, which are of stone, are invariably very handsome.
"Whatever we ask her to do we must do ourselves," said Deb to grumbling Frances, who seemed never willing to do anything; "and of course we shall have to get a washwoman, and a charwoman to scrub; but it will be cheaper in the end. And oh, anything rather than sticky door-handles and greasy spoons, and those awful voices hailing one all over the house!"
The wonderful shapes and sizes of the parcels, the mysterious streets, the door-handles and the door-bells, the glittering stars, the maidservants, the sense of the lighted house, as though you opened a box full of excitements and then hurriedly shut the lid down again. Jeremy trembled and shook, not with cold, but with exalting, completely satisfying happiness.
The sun slanted in upon the packed trunks and dismantled walls; but it blazed also upon brass window-catches, fender-knobs, door-handles all polished and flashing like mirrors. "I am come," said Honoria, "now at the last to ask your pardon." "At the last?" Humility seemed to muse, staring down at one of the trunks; then went on as if speaking to herself. "Yes, yes, it has been a long time."
It was well that Gilbert was near, on the same side, and disengaged her in an instant; but her troubles did not end here. As she bustled in and out of the kitchen, preparing the dinner-table in the long sitting-room, the hooks and door-handles seemed to have an unaccountable habit of thrusting themselves in her way, and she was ready to cry at each glance of Mark's laughing eyes.
Ceilings, windows, doors and door-handles, chests, locks, candlesticks, banisters, waterpots, the very cooking utensils, all betray the fine taste and skilled labor, the personal interest of the man who made them. So in Dürer's house, as it is preserved to-day, we can still see and admire the careful simplicity of domestic furniture, which distinguishes that in the "Birth of the Virgin."
We are to be spared the disgust of seeing them, much more of talking to them or hearing their hideous voices. No longer will our morning milk be burned; no longer will our herrings be grilled to cinders; no longer will our jam be purloined; no longer will our books and door-handles be made abominable by contact with their filthy hands! Thank goodness!