Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 94.djvu/370

360 vention? Strange paradox that the first emotion of the baby soul should be bitterness against all those contrivances of decency, those hemstitched linens and embroidered flannels, through which the mother heart eased its brooding love. The little pink, squirming creature, fresh out of eternity, cannot be too quickly incased in the wrappings of finite human care. That is why we are so long in seeing ourselves as we really are; all the clothes and the conventions were ready for us; before we had a glimpse at ourselves we were popped into them; it is a merciful long while before we are old enough to undress sufficiently to discover, away inside, the little shy soul-thing, the naked ego, with its eerie eyes.

Thus it is that when I first find myself in those early, misty recesses I see myself all dressed, dressed for company inspection; I am a little girl wearing a crispness of brown curl and a crispness of white muslin; I wear white stockings and Burt's shoes. I recognize, also, quite in the same way, as enveloping facts, without which I may not present myself unclothed to my fellows, that I have a peppery, passionate temper, and an imagination, that is what seeing people in void air and talking to them is called. Thus clad and ticketed, I go pattering along the pilgrimage.

How little clothes mattered then! All spun about with fairy films and the witchery of talking trees and singing winds, I did not remember my clothes. But at times clothes broke in abruptly on my unconsciousness. I well remember a certain mitten. It was a brown mitten on my left hand. My mother and I were walking down a flight of stone steps. I slipped; my mother caught my hand, retained, not it, but the mitten, and I bumped unimpeded to the bottom. My baby resentment against that mitten endured long. It was a surprise, a disappointment, this treachery of the accepted; so my clothes were not to be trusted; it was well to keep half an eye on them. The mitten episode marks a step in my spiritual adjustment; my clothes might at any moment go back on me. It is a lesson I have not yet found it safe to unlearn.

In those days there was a pleasant interest attached to the Burt’s shoes, not when new and shiny, but later, when they had become well worn. Some unexpected morning I would espy a peering bit of white stocking looking out from the blackness of the leather toe. The hole being not yet so large or so alarming as the cobbler’s charges, a piece of black silk was adjusted over the stocking, the foot deftly slipped into the shoe, a dash of blacking applied to the whole, and behold, only mother and I knew the difference.

Penury as such was not yet known to me. The consciousness of shabbiness had not yet frayed the elbows of my soul. The device was merely interesting, beguiling the tedium of the sanctuary, and affording meditation on the ingenuity of mothers.

Here succeeded several years of tranquillity in my relations to my garments, until, at the age of six, I found myselfinfelix! removed to a town possessing a bleak climate and many woolen manufactories. It was the custom of the house mothers to buy flannel by the piece direct from the factory, red flannel, hot, thick, felled like a Laplander, and the invention of Lucifer. Out of this flannel was cut a garment, a continuous, all-embracing garment, of neuter gender, in which every child in that town might have been observed flaming Mephistophelian-like after the morning bath. A pattern was given to our mother. The hair shirtI laugh when I read! By definition the hair shirt must have possessed geographical limits of attack, but my flannels left no pore untickled, untortured; they heated the flesh until scarlet fever paled into a mere pleasantry; and they soured the milk of amiability within me forever. The rotation of the seasons reduced itself to terms of red flannel. In the autumn, when the happy