Another reason, I am sure, for Matilda’s dislike to appearing in company was a painful sense of her personal appearance; and as she had heard Aunt Theresa and her friends discuss, approve, and condemn their friends by the standard of appearances alone, ever since she was old enough to overhear company conversation, I hardly think she was much to blame on this point.
Matilda was emphatically at what is called “an awkward age”; an age more awkward with some girls than with others. I wish grown-up ladies, who mean to be kind to their friends’ daughters, would try to remember the awkwardness of it, and not increase a naturally uncomfortable self-consciousness by personal remarks which might disturb the composure of older, prettier, and better-dressed people. It is bad enough to be quite well aware that the size of one’s hands and feet prematurely foreshadow the future growth of one’s figure; that these are the more prominent because the simple dresses of the unintroduced young lady seem to be perpetually receding from one’s bony-wrists above, and shrinking towards the calves of one’s legs below, from those thin ankles on which one is impelled to stand by turns (like a sleeping stork) through some mysterious instinct of relieving the weak and overgrown spine.
This, I say, is mortifying enough, and if modesty and good breeding carry us cheerfully through a not unfelt contrast with the assured manners and flowing draperies of Mamma’s lady friends in the drawing-room, they might spare us the announcement of what it hardly needs gold eyeglasses to discover—that we really grow every day. Blushes come heavily enough to hands and cheeks when to the shyness of youth are added the glows and chills of imperfect circulation: it does not need the stare of strangers, nor the apologies of Mamma, to stain our doubtful complexions with a deeper red.
All girls are not awkward at the awkward age. I speak most disinterestedly on Matilda’s behalf, for I never went through this phase myself. It is perhaps because I am small that I can never remember my hands, or any other part of me, feeling in my way; and my clothes—of whatever length, breadth, or fashion—always had a happy knack of becoming one with me in such wise that I could comfortably forget them.
The St. Quentin girls were nearer to Matilda’s age than I, but they too were very happy and looked very nice in the hobble-de-hoy stage of girlhood. I am sure that they much preferred the company of their young brothers to the company of the drawing-room; but they did what they were told to do, and seemed happy in doing it. They had, however, several advantages over Matilda. By judicious care (for they were not naturally robust) they were kept in good health. They kept a great many pets, and they always seemed to have plenty to do, which perhaps kept them from worrying about themselves. Adelaide, for instance, did all the flowers for the drawing-room and dinner-table. Mrs. St. Quentin said she could not do them so well herself. They had a very small garden to pick from, but Adelaide used lots of wild-flowers and grass and ferns. She often let me help her to fill the china jars, and she was the only person who ever seemed to like hearing about Grandpapa’s paintings. They all did something in the house. But I believe that their greatest advantage over poor Matilda was that they had not been accustomed to hear dress and appearance talked about as matters of the first importance, so that whatever defects they felt conscious of in either did not weigh too heavily on their minds.
On poor Matilda’s they weighed heavily indeed. And she was not only troubled by that consciousness of being plain, by which I think quite as many girls are affected as by the vanity of being pretty (and which has received far less attention from moralists); she was also tormented by certain purely nervous fancies of her face being swollen, her eyes squinting, and her throat choking, when people looked at her, which were due to ill-health.
Unhappily, the ill-health which was a good excuse for Matilda’s unwillingness to “play pretty” in the drawing-room was the subject on which she was more perverse than any other. It was a great pity that she was not frank and confiding with her mother. The detestable trick of small concealments which Miss Perry had taught us was partly answerable for this; but the fault was not entirely Matilda’s.
Aunt Theresa had not time to attend to her. What attention she did give, however, made her so anxious on the subject that she took counsel with every lady of her acquaintance, and the more she talked about poor Matilda’s condition the less leisure she had to think about it.
“It may be more mind than body, I’m afraid,” said Aunt Theresa one afternoon, on our return from some visiting in which Matilda had refused to share. “Mrs. Minchin says she knew a girl who went out of her senses when she was only two years older than Matilda, and it began with her refusing to go anywhere or see any one.”
Major Buller turned round on his chair with an anxious face, and a beetle transfixed by a needle in his hand.