The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.
I never go past the little town nowadays without looking longingly at that farm from the car-window and wondering if the spring and the spearmint are still there. At times I have almost decided to get off the train and seek it, but have never dared—it would be a needless pain to find my one little spring gone dry.
The name of my mother’s rejected suitor was Fairchild. If she could have overcome a certain inexplicable repugnance and married him, “then I might have been a fair child,” I used to think, with a mental play upon the name; for I knew myself to be a very plain little girl. I suffered over this fact; could see myself objectively—greenish-gray eyes, a long nose, a prominent forehead—I hated the sight of my face in the glass, yet would torture myself with scrutinizing it, searching for some redeeming thing, but ending with, “No, there’s nothing, nothing nice about it.” My facial angle I used to study with a hand-glass, mentally cutting about half an inch from my nose, pinning back my ears, and thinking how nice it would be if the straight uncompromising hair would grow low in ripples on that ugly forehead. But, opposed to anything artificial, I would, not bang and curl my hair as the others girls did. Looking at certain girls that I now know were plainer than I, I wondered pitifully if I looked as well as they, afraid of deceiving myself with such cold comfort.
All of which shows how self-engrossed and morbid I was; what capacity for self-torture I developed early. I was constantly reading of beautiful persons. I lamented secretly because my mother was not beautiful. I loved her none the less, but had such a craving for the beautiful, which Fate had cruelly withheld from me and my mother. I have often been ashamed of this feeling; it seems as though a child should so love its mother (and such a mother!) that her face would have to be beautiful to it; but it was not so with me. And it was one of my bitter childish and girlish griefs that Mother would not take more pains always to appear at her best. It seems pathetic, how pleased I used to feel when she would wear particularly becoming gowns, or take special pains with dressing her hair. Unable to overcome this feeling, I have always envied one with a beautiful mother. My mother’s heart and soul are beautiful, but there was always this yearning for beauty of face as well as of character.
Once, as a child, when impersonating Summer at a school exhibition, crowned with roses and bedecked with garlands of flowers, elated by it all, I sang so much better at the concert than I had at rehearsals as to surprise every one, myself included. Best of all I overheard someone say that I “really looked pretty”; that she never knew before that my eyes were black! How I treasured that statement, though knowing it was only a temporary condition!
I have no doubt I exaggerated my ugliness somewhat for, in addition to youth and health, I had a clear dark skin, good teeth, unusually fine and abundant hair, and a well-formed body. The one thing I took pride in was my hair. It was a pardonable pleasure that I felt in contrasting my long heavy brown braids with the wisps of hair many of the girls had. But when I was perhaps sixteen, working too hard in school and with my music, my hair came out so rapidly that one day a girl sitting behind me leaned over and whispered, “Why, what has become of your hair?” Bitter were the tears I shed that night! “That is going, too!” I cried in my wretchedness. But it did not all go; I still had more than the average girl. Even to-day I sometimes get a sudden sense of that schoolgirl’s pang at the threatened loss of her one beauty.
In babyhood I received a burn the shock of which nearly cut short my life: Tied in a high chair and placed before a stove, I was pushed over by some frozen clothes which a “green” Irish girl had brought in from the yard. The under part of my chin rested upon the stove, leaving its imprint, when I was snatched from it.
As I grew up I grieved over the scar thus sustained. I became morbidly sensitive over it, though consoling myself somewhat that it was not in a more conspicuous place. I envied children and girls their smooth soft chins. It seemed to me the sweetest part of a girl’s features—that white, smooth place under the chin. When a child I would never play “Do you love butter?” although I liked to see the buttercup’s yellow shadow on the chins of the other girls. When my turn came I always drew away, painfully embarrassed.
As a young girl I used to think it would be lovely to faint away. When we “made believe,” I usually chose to be French, to have black eyes and red cheeks, and to faint away on critical occasions. But after studying physiology and hygiene, and acquiring more sensible views, I scorned these earlier ambitions, and ridiculed the silly girls who pretended to swoon when vaccinated; and who turned pale and asked to leave the room when the skeleton was brought in to the physiology recitations.
There were only eighteen months between my sister’s age and mine, and, although I was the elder, she dominated me. There was almost no difference in our heights, and not much in our figures. She had a pretty face with fairer skin and sunnier hair. Unobserving persons thought we looked alike. Dressing alike until we were sixteen, we were often asked by strangers if we were twins. Those who mistook one for the other could not have been very discriminating, for with the marked difference in our natures, there must have been, even in childhood, a corresponding difference in our looks. I was quiet, shy, and dreamy; Kate lively, active, outspoken. She had to take the lead because I would hang back. In church, when we were little things, she would fix a place for my head on her lap, then pull me down and pet me, whispering to me to keep still and go to sleep; and, although I knew I should have been the one to play that rôle, I would submit, while she carried out to the finish her assumed dignity.