I turned on my heel, as he might have done, and went to my room. When Mea and I joined our parents in the lower hall, the splendors of the new bonnets were extinguished by thick barege veils. We had not meant to wear them in November. They were indispensable for summer noons. After I had confided my tale of woe to my sister, we hastened to exhume the veils from our trunks and to bind them over our hats. We walked, slow and taciturn, behind our elders for five squares. Then my father turned and beckoned to us. He was actually smiling—a whimsical gleam that had in it something of shame, and much of humor.
“Take off those veils!” he said, positively, yet kindly. And, as we hesitated visibly: “I mean what I say! I want to take a good look at those bonnets.”
It was in a quiet corner of a secluded street, lined with what was once a favorite shade-tree in Richmond—the Otaheite mulberry. The night had been cold, and the last russet leaves were ankle-deep on the sidewalk. They rustled as I moved uneasily in loosening my veil.
I never passed the spot afterward without thinking of the absurd little episode in the history of those melancholy days.
“I see, now, that they are very pretty and very becoming,” my father pursued, as they were divested of the ugly mufflers. “I have been very cross for the past twenty-four hours. I suppose because I have been horribly upset by the National calamity. We will turn over a new and cleaner leaf.”
He was often stern, and oftener imperative. It was his nature to be strong in all that he set his hand or mind unto. I have yet to see another strong man who was so ready to acknowledge a fault, and who made such clean work of the act.
XVI
HOME AT CHRISTMAS—A CANDY-PULL AND HOG-KILLING
We went home at Christmas!