My stuff dress certainly looked plain beside them, but I did not care in the least for that; my own dear mother and I had made it together; and she had hunted up some old precious stores to make me a taffetas jacket, which, as it was the most magnificent apparel I had ever possessed, we had both looked at with much complacency. Nor did it seem to me in the least less beautiful now. The touch of my mother's fingers had been on it, as she smoothed it round me the evening before I came away. And Aunt Elsè had said it was exactly like my mother. But my cousins were not quite pleased, it was evident; especially Fritz and the elder boys. They said nothing; but on the morning of the fête, a beautiful new dress, the counterpart of my cousins', was laid at my bed-side before I awoke.
I put it on with some pleasure, but, when I looked at myself in the glass—it was very unreasonable—I could not bear it. It seemed a reproach on my mother, and on my humble life and my dear, poor home at Eisleben, and I sat down and cried bitterly, until a gentle knock at the door aroused me; and Aunt Elsè came in, and found me sitting with tears on my face and on the beautiful new dress, exceedingly ashamed of myself.
"Don't you like it, my child? It was our Fritz's thought. I was afraid you might not be pleased."
"My mother thought the old one good enough," I said in a very faltering tone. "It was good enough for my home. I had better go home again."
Aunt Elsè was carefully wiping away the tears from my dress, but at these words she began to cry herself, and drew me to her heart, and said it was exactly what she should have felt in her young days at Eisenach, but that I must just wear the new dress to the fête, and then I need never wear it again unless I liked; and that I was right in thinking nothing half so good as my mother, and all she did, because nothing ever was, or would be, she was sure.
So we cried together, and were comforted; and I wore the green taffetas to the fair.
But when I came home again to Eisleben, I felt more ashamed of myself than of the taffetas dress or of the flattering ladies at the Castle. The dear, precious old home, in spite of all I could persuade myself to the contrary, did look small and poor, and the furniture worn and old. And yet I could see there new traces of care and welcome everywhere—fresh rushes on the floors; a new white quilt on my little bed, made, I knew, by my mother's hands.
She knew very soon that I was feeling troubled about something, and soon she knew it all, as I told her my bitter experiences of life.
"Your father, 'only a schoolmaster!'" she said, "and you yourself presented with a new taffetas dress! Are these all your grievances, little Agnes?"
"All, mother!" I exclaimed; "and only!"