Biner said that after our late trip under the existing conditions, we would find the ascent of either the Jungfrau or Wetterhorn very easy, and he would like to take us up. But we were willing—oh, quite willing—to take this easiness on faith. We had not forgotten that he had also called the Strahlegg easy in advance. And Providence does not like to be tempted too often.
There was just a week from the day of our return till the day of Frater’s leaving us to catch a steamer in Genoa, and just another week till we should all leave.
The first thing we wanted was rest in wholesale quantities and the doctoring of feet and fingers.
Emerging from this, we chose the second day for the celebrating of my birthday, which it had not been feasible to do on the proper date. I was the recipient of some very delightful gifts, including an elaborate pyramidal bouquet, with an accompanying note of pleasant sentiments from Suzanne and Anna. Belle Soeur made one of her famous cakes and the candles were sprinkled on top with appalling thickness—a perfect forest of them.
The birthday dinner turned itself, quite unexpectedly, into a fancy dress affair. I was making my toilet for it on the usual lines and had reached that point in my coiffure, when my chevelure was disposed in two long ringlets hanging down each side of my face and neck. I had just picked up my comb to run through them, when the Elder Babe, coming into the room on some errand, began to call out frantically, “Don’t, don’t touch those curls, Mother! Leave them just as they are! Come to dinner that way! You look just like a little girl!”
I smiled and picked up the comb again, but I had miscalculated the seriousness of my son’s enthusiasm. He rushed to the sitting-room door and called his grandmother, aunt and uncle to his assistance. “Come and look at Mother! Don’t let her comb out those curls! Make her come to dinner that way!” He was prancing around like a little bacchante in the joy of the thought.
The three grown-ups appealed to entered into the spirit of the occasion and backed him up. I yielded the point, gracefully I trust, but stipulated that if I was to have a little girl’s coiffure I would wear a little girl’s dress. Belle Soeur offered me her stock of lingerie to select from, it being more ornamental than mine, and I was soon arrayed in a very dainty lace-trimmed white gown with low neck, short sleeves, and a skirt slightly below the knees. With the addition of silk hose and shoon, a sash, shoulder knots and hair ribbons, all of pink, I really wasn’t such a bad-looking little girl!
We had a very merry, foolish, light-hearted evening, the children being in ecstasies over this new effect in mothers, and the servants almost equally so.
This sportive little festival seems to me now like something that happened in another incarnation. It required the absolutely perfect physical condition we had all reached by then and the effervescence of the mountain air to make it possible. But it was the last exuberance.
The season was nearly over. We were soon going back to the world of commonplace. With what reluctant melancholy we clung to those last days, trying to stretch out the hours past their natural limit!