Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 94.djvu/373

Rh clothes, so that I came to watch their expenditures with morbid interest, and if they asked for my advice, the strings of my sincerity were severely strained by “a lively sense of favors yet to come.” In such circumstances it is well to have in the family one who is mother, dressmaker, and genius, all in one, for only such a combination of inspiration and devotion could have kept my head up in those days when I was always second-hand.

To be honest, am I anything else now? What else is it to be fashionable? With brain or scissors every woman is snipping and clipping and cutting over other people’s clothes to fit her figure; real clothes or clothes existent only in the fashion papers or her dressmaker’s brain, but what is the difference? Every woman wears what somebody else has worn. What woman would wear a dress she had not first seen on another woman? Old clothes, making over, copying, copying, copying,—dear me, how second-hand we women are!

The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in a woman’s life when dress becomes an ecstasy—as never afterwards. We always look in the glass when we put on our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen, with its eyes and lips of wonder. For some few years Heaven lets dress be a sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or the studied concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a revelation of the new self of which we are neither unconscious nor ashamed. It is but the working of natural laws; in the spring do not the very trees prank themselves out in a vain glory of blossoms, do they not prink and preen in the mirroring water, arranging their leafy tresses, and bedecking themselves for the masculine regard of sunbeams and breezes? So girls, and many a one quite as unconsciously. The sap stirs and the leaf sprouts, and the stirring of the sap is a thrilling of new joy, and the leaf is a new and beautiful thing. What is it, what am I becoming? Look in the glass and see. That is womanhood burning in my eyes, on my cheeks,—Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too, if you wish. When my skirts have grown all the way down, and my braids all the way up, then there will be coronation robes ready, and a kingdom, and a king. Now I am only a schoolgirl, but it is all coming, coming, coming! Do you wonder that she counts each inch on her skirt in an agony of impatience, that she arranges her hair high on her head at night before her mirror? Schoolgirl nonsense, and something else. Then one day it is the hour at last,—it is the first long dress, cut to show the regal throat, trained like a queen’s. The hair is piled up diadem-wise. ‘The princess is ready. The color comes and goes, the slipper taps the floor—“I am all dressed for you. I am waiting. Come, Prince, hurry, hurry!”

But, O little Princess, it is not at all like what you think, really; so soon your long skirts will have ceased to tickle your toes with delight, and your coroneted tresses will seem to have grown that way. The Prince will have come, and you will have got used to him, or he will not have come, and you will have forgotten that you ever expected him; the clothes of womanhood will no longer be a rapture, but an obligation and a habit. You will find yourself wearing a personality restricted by that thing you have somehow acquired, called a style of your own, and restricted also by the style of all the other women in the world, so that you will find yourself wearing those dresses only, and saying those words only, that both yourself and others expect of you; it will not seem a very wonderful thing to be a woman, after all. But remember, Miss or Madam Princess, that you must still go on dressing, dressing, dressing to the end.

What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes when one sex possesses the freedom of uniform, and the other is the slave of ever-varying costume! Think of the great portion of a lifetime we women are condemned to spend merely on keep