WHAT HAPPENED TO KATHIE AND LU.
It was a very great misfortune, and it must have been a sad affliction to the friends of the two children, for both were once pretty and charming.
It came about in this way.
Little Winnie Tennyson—she wasn’t the daughter of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the poet-laureate of England, but was as sweet as any one of that gentleman’s poems—had been to the city; and she had brought home so many wondrous improvements that her two little bosom friends, Lu Medway and Kathie Dysart, were almost struck dumb to behold and to hear what Winnie said and what Winnie had.026
For one thing, there were some wooden blocks, all fluted and grooved, and Winnie could heat these blocks in the oven, and wet her hair, and lay it between them, and O! how satin-smooth the waves would be,—hair-pin-crimps and braid-crimps were nothing to this new and scientific way.
Winnie also made it a matter of pride to display her overskirts. These were arranged with ever so many tapes on the inside, and would readily tie up into the most ravishing bunches and puffs—how Lu and Kathie, wee-est mites of women though they were, did envy Winnie her tapes! Their mammas didn’t know how to loop a dress—witness their little skirts pinned back into what Kathie called a “wopse.”
She also had brought some tiny parlor skates, and, withal, many airs and graces which her two young-lady aunties had taught her, among others a funny little new accent on some of her words,—the word “pretty” in particular. And, last of all, she had been taught to dance!
“And I can show you,” Winnie said, eagerly, “’cause it goes by ‘steps,’ and uncle says I take them as pr-i-tty as Cousin Lily.”
Now, in Connaut, little girls don’t dance—not nice little girls, nor nice big girls either, for that matter.
The dimpled mouths opened in astonishment. “That is wicked, Winnie Ten’son, don’t you know?”027
“O, but ’tisn’t,” said Winnie. “My aunties dance, and their mamma, my grandmamma, was at the party once.”
“We shall tell our mothers,” said Lu. “I’ll bet you’ve come home a proud, wicked girl, and you want us to be as bad as you are.”
Now Winnie was only six years old, about the same age as her virtuous friends, and she didn’t look very wicked. She had pink cheeks, and blue eyes, and dimples. She stood gazing at her accusers, first at one and then at the other.028
“Luie,” said Kathie, gravely, “we mustn’t call Winnie wicked till we ask our mothers if she is.”
“No, I don’t think I would,” said Mrs. Tennyson, looking up from her sewing, her cheek flushing at the sight of tears in her little Winnie’s gentle eyes.
On the way home, they chanced to see their own minister walking along. Lu stopped short. “Kathie,” said she, “I know it’s awful wicked now, or else we never should have met the minister right here. I’m just going to tell him about Winnie.”
She went up to him, Kathie following shyly.
“Mr. Goodhue, Winnie Ten’son is a nawful wicked girl!”
“She is!” said Mr. Goodhue, stopping, and looking down into the little eager face.
“Yes, sir, she is. She wants us to dance!”
“She does!”
“Yes, sir, she does. She wanted us to learn the steps, right down in her garden this afternoon. Would you dance, Mr. Goodhue?”
“Would I? Perhaps I might, were I as little and spry as you, and Winnie would teach me steps, and it was down in the garden.”
The little girls looked up into his face searchingly. He walked on laughing, and they went on homeward, to ask further advice.029
At home, too, everyone seemed to think it a matter for smiles, and laughed at the two tender little consciences.
So they both ran back after dinner to Mrs. Tennyson’s. But on the way Kathie said, “They let us, the minister and ev’ry body, but if it is wicked ever, how isn’t it wicked now?”
“I s’pose ’cause we’re children,” Lu said wisely.
The logical trouble thus laid, they tripped on.
They were dressed in sweet pink, and their sun-bonnets were as fresh and crisp as only the sun-bonnets of dear little country school-girls ever can be. It was a most merry summer day; all nature moving gladsomely to the full music of life. The leaves were fluttering to each other, the grasses sweeping up and down, the bobolinks hopping by the meadow path.
Their friend Winnie came out to meet them, looking rather astonished.
“We’re going to learn,” shouted Lu, “get on your bonnet.”
“But you wasn’t good to me to-day,” said Winnie, thoughtfully.
“We didn’t da’st to be,” said Kathie, “till we’d asked somebody that knew.”
Mrs. Tennyson was half of the mind to call her little daughter in; yet she felt it a pity to be less sweet and forgiving than the child.030
Winnie already had her class before her. “Now you must do just as I do. You must hold your dress back so,—not grab it, but hold it back nice, and you must bend forward so, and you must point your slippers so,—not stand flat.”
Very graceful the little dancing-teacher looked, tip-toeing here, gliding there, twinkling through a series of pretty steps down the long garden walk.
But the pupils! Do the best she might, sturdy little Kathie couldn’t manage her dress. She grasped it tightly in either fat little fist. “Mother Bunch!” Lu giggled behind her back.
Kathie’s face got very red over that. It was well enough to be “Dumpling,”—everybody loves a dumpling; but “Mother Bunch!” So she bounced and shuffled a little longer, and then she said she was going home.
But Miss Lu wasn’t ready. She greatly liked the new fun, the hopping and whirling to Winnie’s steady “One, two, three! One, two, three!” There was a grown-up, affected smirk on her delicate little face, at which Mrs. Tennyson laughed every time she looked out. I think Lu would have hopped and minced up and down the walk until night, if Winnie’s mother hadn’t told them it was time to go.
“I don’t like her old steps,” said Kathie. They were sitting on a daisy bank near Mr. Medway’s.031
“Well, I do,” said Lu. “And you would, too, if you wasn’t so chunked. You just bounced up and down.”
Kathie burst out crying. “I’ll bet dancing steps is wicked, for you never was so mean before in your life, so! And you didn’t dance near so pretty as Winnie, and you needn’t think you ever will, for you never will!”
“Oh! I won’t, won’t I?” said Lu, teasingly.
“No, you won’t. I won’t be wicked and say you are nice, for you’re horrid.”
“You’re wicked this minute, Kathie Dysart, for you’re mad.”
And as she laughed a naughty laugh, and as Kathie glared back at her, then it was that that which happened began to happen. Lu’s delicate, rosy mouth commenced drawing up at the corners in an ugly fashion, and her nose commenced drawing down, while her dimpled chin thrust itself out in a taunting manner; but the horror of it was that she couldn’t straighten her lips, nor could she draw in her chin when she tried.
“You dis’gree’ble thing!” shrieked Kathie, looking at her and feeling dreadfully, her eyebrows knotting up like two little squirming snakes. “If I’m a Mother Bunch, you’re a bean-pole, and you’ll be an ugly old witch some day, and you’ll dry up and you’ll blow away.”032
By this time the two little pink starched sun-bonnets fairly stood on end at each other.
“Kathie Dysart, I’ll tell your Sunday-school teacher, see if I don’t.”
“Tell her what? you old, old, OLD thing!”
Kathie Dysart loved her Sunday-school teacher, and now she was in a rage. She couldn’t begin to scowl as fiercely as she felt; her cheeks sunk in, her lips drew down, her nose grew sharp and long in the effort. And, all at once, as the children say, her face “froze” so. Oh! it was perfectly horrid, that which happened to the two little dears, it was indeed. They could not possibly look away from each other, and they grew older and uglier each moment! Why, their 033very sun-bonnets—those fresh little pink sun-bonnets—shriveled into old women’s caps, and even in the hearts of the poor little old crones the hardening process was going on, a fierce fire of hate scorching the last central drop of dew, until nothing would ever, ever grow and bloom again.
It was all over with Lu and Kathie forever and ever.
All this was long ago, of course—indeed, it happened “once upon a time.” It would be difficult now to verify each point in the account. On the contrary, I suppose it just possible that there may be a mistake as to the transformation of the children’s clothes—the change of the sun-bonnets into caps, for instance.
But, as a whole, I see no reason to doubt the story. Often, and quite recently, too, I have seen little faces in danger of a similar transformation.
Where anger, envy, spite, and some others of the ill-tempers, gain control of the nerves and muscles of the human countenance, they pull and twitch and knot and tie these nerves and muscles, until it is almost impossible to recognize the face.
Sometimes this change has passed off in a minute; but at other times it has lasted for hours, and there is always danger that the face will fail to recover its 034pleasantness wholly, that traces will remain, like wrinkles in a ribbon that has been tied, and that, at last, the transformation will be final and fatal, and the fair child become and remain “a horrid old witch.”
Of one thing we all are certain—that the most gossiping and malicious person now living was once a fair and innocent child; so who shall say that this which I have related did not happen to Lu and Kathie?
