What a plain little bridesmaid I had been, to what an exquisite vision of a bride! I remember thinking as we, the bridal party, walked through the long rooms, when all was gay, and ceremony was broken through at supper-time—when the rooms rustled with the turning of the groups to look after her and the murmur went along about her beauty—“What difference ought it to make, that she is the beauty, and that I can never be,—so long as the beauty is and we all feel it?” Yet the strange difference was there, and the cross of my beauty-loving nature was that I in my own being and movement, could never hold and represent it.
I looked at myself when I had dressed for this large party. The lovely blue silk—the delicate lace—the white roses—they almost achieved prettiness enough of themselves; and I suppose I looked as nice as I could; but there were still the too prominent brows, the nose too big for the eyes, the lips too easily parted over the teeth fine and white, but contributing to the excess of profile, or middle-face, that had made me call it Rocky-Mountain outline when I was a child.
I went down to my step-mamma’s room. She, in her ruby-colored satin, was fairer at thirty-eight than I at seventeen. I sat watching her as she put pearl earrings into her ears.
“For-mamma,” I said, “I don’t believe I shall ever care much for parties. And it will be for a very mean and selfish reason, too.—I think it is only pretty people who can enjoy them much.”
She laid down the second pearl hoop on the table, and came to me.
“Emmie,” she said, “I know it is a hard thing for a woman who loves all lovely things, not to be very beautiful herself. The dear Lord has not made you very beautiful, in mere features. But can’t you wear a plain face awhile, because He has given it to you to wear, and trust to Him to make it lovely in his way and season?”
My step-mamma hardly ever said anything so direct as this to me, about religion. She only lived her religion in a pleasant, comfortable, unassuming way, and kept a light shining by which I saw—without her flashing it upon me like a dark-lantern—into any little selfish or God-forgetful course of my own life. Now, these words came to me—across ten years—the very words said to me in that same room, at that same hour of night.... Why—it was the very night! We were going to a New Year’s party.
A great heart-beat came up in my throat, and the tears pressed up together into face and eyes, while I felt the kindling of my own look, and saw what it must be by the answering color and the light in hers.
I put my hands out and reached them round her waist as she stood close to me in her beautiful glowing dress, under which a more beautiful heart was glowing brighter. “I cannot tell you two apart, Mamma and For-mamma!” I said.
We went together to the party. For-mamma had to put her one pearl hoop in her pocket after she got there, for she had forgotten the other on her dressing table. And what that party was to me I wonder if any grand, lovely, tender church-service ever was to anybody, more or better!