The Tailoress was different from the other working-people that I knew. Most of them were weighed down by a constant sense of wrong, but the Tailoress never rebelled against the hardships of her lot. They seemed to have no power over her. Perhaps she forgot them in her hunger and thirst for beauty and knowledge.
I remember some of her remarks. Once, when some one was denouncing the useless luxury of the lives of the rich, the Tailoress looked up quickly.
“I don’t feel like that,” she said, in her deep, masculine voice. “Why should we grudge them the beauty of their lives? God knows what is best. I am glad that there are people in the world who can have the things they want.”
We took her to the Art Museum, and she was as one possessed. I found her in a room devoted to Greek sculpture, sitting alone and silent. She rose, with the face of one greatly moved, and grasped my arm.
“What does it matter,” she said, “all the suffering and the lack, in a world that has in it things like this?”
It was hard to induce her to come away. “It makes me so happy to stay here,” she said. “It is full of beauty and of peace.”
Doubtless it was her longing for something else that kept her from rising in her trade. After twenty-two years of work she was still a vest-maker, never having shown sufficient ambition to try her skill as a maker of coats.
Now a crisis came in her life. She went to hear the Altruist lecture, and became his most ardent disciple. I think that he unlocked the gates of Heaven to her. Through the glamour of his eloquence she caught sight of the pinnacles and towers of the city of her dreams. Unconsciously she adopted his opinions and his tastes. Cardinal Newman’s “Dream of Gerontius” appeared among the books on her table, and the Correggio cherubs gave way to a thin Giotto saint.
Her devotion was so extreme that the Altruist at last learned to distinguish her from his many other followers. He saw her strength, and confided to me the way in which he thought it should be used. The Tailoress had personal ambition, aspiration, he said, but it seemed to him hardly worth while to encourage that. She was too old. In our attempts to serve Humanity, we must utilize our forces in the most economical way, and must work with the young. It was too late for her to fulfil her own life; she must learn to help fulfil the lives of others.
She needed, first of all, to be led up to a higher spiritual plane. There was something pagan in her thirst for pure beauty. Under his forming touch she might grow into more impersonal and holier ambition.