“Wall,” says Kellup, lookin’ keen at my head-dress, “I don’t consider it likely, anyway, to spend so much time a dressin’ up—it is a shiftless waste of time, anyway.”
“Why,” says I; for the more he scolded me, the plainer I see the other side of things. So curious are human bein’s constituted and sot.
HARD AT IT.
“Nater has always been considered likely—I never heard a word against her character, and she is stiddy minded, too, and hard workin’. She works hard, Nater does. She works almost beyond her strength sometimes. She has sights of work on her hands all the hull time, and she has a remarkable knack of turnin’ off tremendous day’s works. And I never in my hull life heard her called shiftless or slack. But what a case she is to orniment herself off; to rag out and show herself in so many different colors. And if she feels better to be dressed up and fixed off kinder pretty while she’s to work, I don’t know whose business it is. I never was no case myself to dress up in white book muslin, or pink silk, or bobonet lace, or anything of that kind, when I was a doin’ hard jobs, such as makin’ soap, and runnin’ candles, and cleanin’ house, and etcetery. And when I have got to be out in the rain when it is all drabbly and muddy, why I jest wrap up and look like fury. But she don’t. No! I have known her time and agin to tie the most gorgeous and shinin’ rainbow round her old waist and jest lay herself out to look foamin’ and dressy, right there in the rain.
“It beats all how she does fix herself up. But it don’t hurt my feelin’s at all. I never was a mite jealous of other females lookin’ better than I did. The better they look, the better I enjoy lookin’ at ’em. And if Nater can dress up better and look better while she is a doin’ her spring work and all her other hard jobs than I can, good land! how simple it would be in me to blame her. There is where I use such cast-iron reason. You don’t ketch me a blamin’ other folks for their little personal ways and habits that don’t do nobody no hurt. She is well off, Nater is, and able to do as she is a mind to; she has got plenty to do with; she don’t have to scrimp herself to buy flowers, and tossels, and rainbows. If she did, I shouldn’t approve of it in her, not at all. I despise folks goin’ beyond their means to look pretty. I think it is wicked, and the height of dretfulness. But if them that are abundantly able and willin’ want to look nice, I say, let ’em look.”
And I cast a conscious and sort of a modest glance up into the lookin’-glass that hung over the table. I could jest ketch a glimpse of my head-dress, and I see that its strings floated out noble, and I see at the same glance that he was still lookin’ witherin’ at it. But I didn’t care a mite for it. I was jest filled with my subject (that side of it, for every subject has got more’n a dozen sides to it), and the more he cast them witherin’ looks onto me the more I wuzn’t withered—but soared up in mind, and grew eloquent.
And I went on fearfully eloquent about Nater, and the way she fixed herself up perfectly beautiful—right when she was a workin’ the hardest.
“Why,” says I, “when she goes way down into the depths of the under world to make iron, and coal, and salt, and things that has got to be made, and she has got to make ’em—why, she can’t be contented way down there in the dark, all alone by herself, without deckin’ herself off with diamonds, and all sorts of precious gems, and holdin’ up wreaths of shinin’ crystal, enameled fern fronds, and hangin’ clusters snowy white, and those shinin’ with every dazzlin’ hue.
“And way down on the ocean floor, fifteen miles or so down below, where she would naturally expect nobody would come a visatin’—why, way down there, where she must know that there hain’t no company liable to drop in on her onexpected, yet every minute of the time she is all ornimented off with pearls, and opal-tinted shells, daintest green and crimson seagrass, gem-like purple astreas, wonderful pink and white coral wreaths—all strange and lovely blossoms of the sea.