“Too poor for that? Mrs. Turner’s daughter takes in all such gimcracks. Send what you’ve got over to her, and I’ll pay for the making.”
“Miss Carr!” said Flora, greatly distressed.
“What, angry again?”
“No, not exactly angry; but you wound my pride.”
“It would do you no harm to kill it outright,” said Miss Carr, laughing—such a loud, jovial peal of merriment, which rang so clearly from her healthy lungs, that Flora, in spite of her offended dignity, was forced to laugh too.
“You feel better now. I hope the proud fit is going off, and we can enjoy a reasonable chat. These clothes—what a bore they are, to both poor and rich,—the rich setting their heart too much upon them, and the poor despised because they have not enough to keep them warm,—and those mean and old. Then, this is not all. There are the perpetual changes of the fashions, which oblige people to put on what does not suit them, and to make monstrous frights of themselves to dress in the mode. You must have a morning-gown, a dinner-dress, and an evening costume; all to be shifted and changed in the same day, consuming a deal of time, which might be enjoyed in wholesome exercise. I have no patience with such folly. The animals, let me tell you, are a great deal better off than their masters. Nature has provided them with a coat which never wants changing but once a-year; and that is done so gradually, that they experience no inconvenience. No need of their consulting the fashions, or patching and stitching to keep up a decent appearance. It is a thousand pities that clothes were ever invented. People would have been much healthier, and looked much better without them.”
“My dear madam, did not God himself instruct our first parents to make garments of the skins of animals?”
“They were not necessary in a state of innocence, or He would have created them like cows and horses, with clothes upon their backs,” said Wilhelmina, sharply. “It was their own fault that they ever required such trumpery, entailing upon their posterity a curse as bad as the thorns and thistles. For I always consider it as such, when sweltering under the weight of gowns and petticoats on a hot day; and I rate Mother Eve roundly, and in no measured terms, for her folly in losing the glorious privilege of walking in buff.”
“You must have been thinking of that,” said Flora, rather mischievously, and glancing down at Miss Wilhelmina’s legs, “when you cut your petticoats so short.”
“You are welcome to laugh at any short petticoats,” said Wilhelmina, “as long as I feel the comfort of wearing them. Now do tell me, candidly,—what impropriety is there in a woman showing her leg and foot, more than in another woman showing her hand and arm? The evil lies in your own thoughts. You see the Bavarian buy-a-broom girls passing before your windows every day, with petticoats cut three or four inches shorter than mine. You perceive no harm in that. ‘It is the fashion of her country,’ you cry. Custom banishes from our minds the idea of impropriety; and the naked savage of the woods is as modest as the closely covered civilian. Now, why am I compelled to wear long petticoats drabbling in the mud, when a Bavarian may wear hers up to the knees, and nobody think the worse of her? I am as much a free agent as she is; have as much right to wear what I please. I like short petticoats—I can walk better in them—they neither take up the dust or the mud, and leave my motions free and untrammelled—and what’s more, I mean to wear them.