Glory curled the baby's hair, and made him "look pretty." Mrs. Grubbling cut her little handmaid's short to save trouble; so that the very determined yellow locks which, under more favoring circumstances of place and fortune, might have been trained into lovely golden curls, stood up continually in their restless reaching after the fairer destiny that had been meant for them, in the old fuzz-ball fashion; and Glory grew more and more to justify her name.
Do you think she didn't know what beauty was—this child who never had a new or pretty garment, but who wore frocks "fadged up" out of old, faded breadths of her mistress's dresses, and bonnets with brims cut off and topknots taken down, and coarse shoes, and stockings cut out of the legs of those whereof Mrs. Grubbling had worn out the extremities? Do you think she didn't feel the difference, and that it wasn't this that made her shuffle along so with her toes in, when she sped along the streets upon her manifold errands, and met gentle-people's children laughing and skipping their hoops upon the sidewalks?
Out of all lives, actual and possible, each one of us appropriates continually into his own. This is a world of hints only, out of which every soul seizes to itself what it needs.
This girl, uncherished, repressed in every natural longing to be and to have, took in all the more of what was possible; for God had given her this glorious insight, this imagination, wherewith we fill up life's scanty outline, and grasp at all that might be, or that elsewhere, is. In her, as in us all, it was often—nay, daily—a discontent; yet a noble discontent, and curbed with a grand, unconscious patience. She scoured her knives; she shuffled along the streets on hasty errands; she went up and down the house in her small menial duties; she put on and off her coarse, repulsive clothing; she uttered herself in her common, ignorant forms of speech; she showed only as a poor, low, little Irish girl with red hair and staring, wondering eyes, and awkward movements, and a frightened fashion of getting into everybody's way; and yet, behind all this, there was another life that went on in a hidden beauty that you and I cannot fathom, save only as God gives the like, inwardly, to ourselves.
When Glory's mistress cut her hair, there were always tears and rebellion. It was her one, eager, passionate longing, in these childish days, that these locks of hers should be let to grow. She thought she could almost bear anything else, if only this stiff, unseemly crop might lengthen out into waves and ringlets that should toss in the wind like the carefully kempt tresses of children she met in the streets. She imagined it would be a complete and utter happiness just once to feel it falling in its wealth about her shoulders or dropping against her cheeks; and to be able to look at it with her eyes, and twist her fingers in it at the ends. And so, when it got to be its longest, and began to make itself troublesome about her forehead, and to peep below her shabby bonnet in her neck, she had a brief season of wonderful enjoyment in it. Then she could "make believe" it had really grown out; and the comfort she took in "going through the motions"—pretending to tuck behind her ears what scarcely touched their tips, and tossing her head continually, to throw back imaginary masses of curls, was truly indescribable, and such as I could not begin to make you understand.
"Half-witted monkey!" Mrs. Grubbling would ejaculate, contemptuously, seeing, with what she conceived marvelous penetration, the half of her little servant's thought, and so pronouncing from her own half wit. Then the great shears came out, and the instinct of grace and beauty in the child was pitilessly outraged, and her soul mutilated, as it were, in every clip of the inexorable shears.
She was always glad—poor Glory—when the springtime came. She took Bubby and Baby down to the Common, of a May Day, to see the processions and the paper-crowned queens; and stood there in her stained and drabbled dress, with the big year-and-a-half-old baby in her arms, and so quite at the mercy of Master Herbert Clarence, who defiantly skipped oft down the avenues, and almost out of her sight—she looking after him in helpless dismay, lest he should get a splash or a tumble, or be altogether lost; and then what would the mistress say? Standing there so—the troops of children in their holiday trim passing close beside her—her young heart turned bitter for a moment, as it sometimes would; and her one utterance of all that swelled her martyr soul broke forth:
"Laws a me! Sech lots of good times in the world, and I ain't in 'em!"
Yet, that afternoon, when Mrs. Grubbling went out shopping, and left her to her own devices with the children, how jubilantly she trained the battered chairs in line, and put herself at the head, with Bubby's scarlet tippet wreathed about her upstart locks, and made a May Day!
I say, she had the soul and essence of the very life she seemed to miss.