LIVABLE | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 1, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 22.

"LIVABLE."

"Yes," said Mrs. Farren, decidedly, "Milly Morris is a nice girl clear through, and if anybody ought to get along easy with a tryin' mother-in-law, she ought. A more livable person I never knew."

"Livable?" repeated her listener. "Livable? That must be a local word. I don't think I ever heard it before."

"It may be local," rejoined Mrs. Farren, a trifle loftily, "and it may be bad, and it may be good; but anyhow it's just what I mean. Milly's livable. She's been brought up in a big family, and she's had to be, if she meant to be comfortable herself and let other folks be comfortable too. There were more livable folks when I was a girl than there are now, and I think the big families had a good deal to do with it, tho of course not everything.

"There were plenty of people then who never got their corners worn down, no matter how many brothers and sisters they had; but even when they rasped, those days, they got along together after a fashion. Nowadays, land! sometimes it stumps me fair and square why the nice people I know in nice families can't seem to stand each other's little ways.

"O, I don't say it isn't so; when the doctors say they can't—and it generally ends in doctors—why, I suppose they truly can't. It's nerves, and nobody understands nerves unless the doctors, and I'm a long way from being sure that they do. But just you count up sometime the families where there's always one member mysteriously off visiting, and then the number of folks you know that separate when they'd naturally stay together, if only they could hit it off—lone sisters and only-surviving bachelor brothers, and mothers and only daughters, and all sorts of family remnants that ought to be each other's best comfort. But as soon as they try living together, one of 'em gets nervous prostration, or has hysteric spells, or is ordered off quick to travel somewhere where the climate doesn't agree with the other one. They're fond enough of each other, generally, and they aren't generally ugly-tempered; they just aren't livable.

"It can't be endured, always, and it can't be cured, sometimes; but I'm firm in believing it could be prevented most times. If, when folks first began to harden in their own little crankums and fret over the cranks of the folks they care most for, they'd stop and think of what they were doing and where they were getting to, why, ninety-nine times out of a hundred they'd pull up in time, and get their nerves and feelings and foolish frettings tight in hand before they run away with 'em!

"Yes, that's what I surely do believe. And outside the great, big, deep foundation virtues, if I had a daughter, the little virtue, if it is a little virtue, I'd rather have her have than any other would be just that, being livable. It's an all-round, lifelong blessing to whomsoever it concerns."

"It may be good or it may be bad or it may be local," assented the listener thoughtfully, "but whatever it is as a word, livable is a good thing to be. I'll own that."—Youth's Companion.