[1] Ostrich.
These were a few of the terrible obstacles in the path to beauty which she set herself to overcome. There were other arts, too, she would practise to the same end. She would brush her hair until it sprang into waves, even as the hair of the beautiful one in brown. She would cut her eyelashes, as Clara did, to make them thick and long. She would run and jump, even when she was tired, to make her body strong and her cheeks pink. She would walk upright, even when she had the pain in her stomach, so that she might grow tall and graceful. Furthermore, she would find out from old Sara where that wonderful milky cactus grew, which the young Basuto girls gathered and rubbed upon their breasts in the moonlight to make them grow round and firm as young apples.
Last, but most important of all, she evolved from her dreamings and devisings a promise to herself that she would never, never do mean things, for meanness she surely knew to be the friend of hideousness. Meanness showed in the face. Could not anyone see it in Aunt Lena's face? The traces of mean thoughts and deeds showed in the narrow space between her eyebrows, in the specks in her pale eyes, were brushed into her sleek, putty-coloured hair and crinkled her coarse thick hands. If you only looked at the freckles and loose skin all round her wrists, her fat fingers and the way her ears stuck out, you must see how cruel and hateful she could be, thought Poppy. Whereupon, forgetting the greatest of her resolutions in a moment, she fell to hating her Aunt Lena again with a particular malignancy. But presently she noticed that the trees were casting long giant shadows towards the town, pansy-coloured clouds were in the sky, and a certain dewiness had come into the air. Hastily collecting the children she departed with them. In the same order as they came, they returned home down the long white street.
But it was hard in the house of Aunt Lena Kennedy to attain beauty through virtue.
On Saturdays Poppy even forgot that she had ever made resolutions to that end. Upon that day of days, Mrs. Kennedy subjected her house and all that therein was to a scrubbing in which there was no niggardliness of what she termed "elbow grease." Poppy was not exempt; her turn came at ten o'clock at night; and that was the hour of shame and rage for Poppy. When all the rest of the children were comfortably in bed, sucking their weekly supply of lekkers, Mrs. Kennedy would roll up her sleeves and approach in a workmanlike manner the big pan-bath in the middle of the kitchen, wherein stood Poppy, lank, thin-limbed, and trembling—but not with cold—under the scrutiny of the speckled eyes she hated so well.
"Ah! you bad-tempered little cat!" was the usual preliminary; "why can't you be grateful to me for taking the trouble to keep you clean? It isn't every aunt by marriage who would do it, I can tell you. I suppose you'd like to go about with the dirt ingrained in you! What are you shivering and cringing like that for? Are you ashamed of your own body?"
"It is horrible to be naked, aunt," she would retort, striving to keep tears from bursting forth and full of apprehension that someone might come into the wide-open kitchen doors.
"Horrible! what's horrible about it, I'd like to know, except in your own nasty little mind? A body like a spring-kaan,[2] that's what you've got ... and don't want me to see it, I suppose! Dirty pride! the ugliest child I've ever seen ... the longest legs ... and the skinniest arms ... look what nice fat arms Clara and Emily's got! ... one would think you never got enough to eat ... pass me that other arm."
[2] Grasshopper.