A square, stone house, with a piazza in front (only people out of America are so stupid, they don't know what I mean when I say "piazza"); about six feet of yard with some grass and flowers. Me at school; Mamma reading novels with one eye, and darning papa's stockings with the other. My goodness, what a different Mamma! When I thought of the difference, I was surer than ever that I must be dreaming her as she is now, and I had half a mind to go and peek into the next room to look, and risk falling down-stairs bang into realities and Denver.
Would she have smooth, straight dark hair with a few threads of grey, all streaked back flat to her head to please papa; or would she have lovely auburn waves done on a frame, with a curl draped over her forehead? Would her complexion be just as nice, comfortable, motherly sort of complexion, of no particular colour; or would it be pink and white like rose-leaves floating in cream? Would she have the kind of figure to fit the corsets you can pick up at any shop, ready made for fifty-nine and a half cents, and the dresses Miss Pettingill makes for ten dollars, with the front breadth shorter than the back? Or would she go in at the waist like an hour-glass and out like an hour-glass, to fit three hundred-franc stays in Paris, and dresses that would be tight for me?
Poor Mamma! I'd made lots of fun of her these last few months, if they were real months, I said to myself; and if more real months of that kind should come, I'd probably make lots of fun of her again. I am like that; I can't help it. I suppose it's what Papa used to call his "originality," and Mamma his "cantankerousness," coming out in me. But lying there in the narrow bed, with the dream-dawn fluttering little pale wings at the window, I seemed suddenly to understand how hard everything had been for her.
At some minutes, on some days, you do understand people with a queer kind of clearness, almost as if you had created them yourself—even people that you turn up your nose at, and think silly or uninteresting at other times, when your senses aren't sharpened in that magic sort of way. My "God-days," are what I call those strange days when I can sympathize with every one as if I'd known their whole history and all their troubles and thoughts and struggles, ever since they were born. I call them that, not to be irreverent, but because I suppose God always feels so; and the little spark of Him that's in every human being—even in a naughty, pert thing like me—comes out in us more on some days than on others, though only for a few minutes at a stretch even then.
Well, my spark burned up quite brightly for a little while in the dawn, as I was thinking of Mamma.
I don't suppose she could ever have been in love with Papa. I guess she must have married him because her parents were poor, or because she was too kind hearted to say no. Anyway, it must have been horrid for her to know that he was rich enough to let her do anything she liked, but wouldn't let her do anything nice, because he was a Consistent Democrat, and didn't believe in show or "tomfoolery."
I'm sure I couldn't explain what a Consistent Democrat really is; but Papa's idea of being it was to scorn "society people," not to have pretty clothes or many servants, to look plain and speak plainly, always to tell the whole truth, especially if you would hurt anybody's feelings by doing so, and not to spend much money except on uninteresting books
.
Mamma would have loved better than anything to be a society leader, and have her name appear often in the papers, like other ladies in Denver who, she used to tell me, didn't come from half as good family as she did. But Papa wouldn't let her go out much, and she didn't know any of the people she wanted to know—only quite common ones whose husbands kept stores or had other businesses which she didn't consider refined. I'm afraid I was never much comfort to poor Mamma either. That cantankerousness of mine which makes me see how funny people and things are, always came between us, and I expect it always will. I must have been born old.
Her only real pleasure was reading novels on the sly, all about smart society and the aristocracy, but especially English aristocracy. She simply revelled in such stories; and when Papa died suddenly without time to tie up his money so as to force Mamma to go on doing what he wanted, and not what she wanted, all the rest of her life, the first thing that occurred to her was how to make up for lost time.