Slowly and fairly,—we come to it now.
CHAPTER IV.
When the neat and modest little mistress of the Hendrik Athenæum and Circulating Library descended to open the shop and take down the bars, all her sense of delicacy was shocked, and she was brought to shame; for her meek skirts, missing the generous support of the quilted silk petticoat, clung about her mortified extremities in thin and limp dejection. It was plain to Miss Wimple that she looked poverty-stricken,—an aspect most dreadful to the poor, and upon which the brothers and sisters of penury who by hook or by crook contrive to keep up appearances for the nonce have no mercy. "Today," she thought, "callers will delight me not, nor customers neither." But Miss Wimple was in a peculiarly provoking predicament, and for such there is ever a malignant star;—callers and customers dropped in, one after another, all day, as they had rarely come before,—as though, indeed, her most spiteful enemy had got wind of the petticoat affair, and sent them to plague her.
That day, Miss Wimple had recourse to as much painfully ingenious dodging behind the low counters as though she had a cloven foot to hide. When evening came, she could have sat down—if she had been any other plagued woman in the world but Sally Wimple—and had a good cry. It was bitter weather, and she had shivered much;—she did not mind that; but to look poverty-stricken! No, she did not cry outside, but it was a narrow escape. In her trouble, her eyes wandered around the shop beseechingly; and lo! she beheld in the window a timely hooped skirt,—a daring speculation wherein she had lately invested, in consideration of the growing importance of her millinery department; and straightway Miss Wimple went and took the hoop, and offered it up for a pride-offering in the stead of her delicacy, that was so dear to her. It was a thing of touching artlessness to do; only so cunning-simple a soul as Sally Wimple could ever have thought of it. She sat up late that night, engaged in compromising with her prejudices, by drawing out the whalebones, one by one, from the "Alboni," shaving them down with a piece of glass, very thin, and tucking them,—until all their loud defiance was subdued, and for Miss Wimple's Hoop it might be tenderly deprecated that it was nothing to speak of, "such a leetle one."
The sacrifice was made, and, let us hope, not merely figuratively accepted by Him to whom prejudices may arise today an offering not less honored than was the blood of rams in the hour when Abraham laid his first-born on an altar in the thicket of Jehovah-jireh.
If any challenge the probabilities of this incident, and cavil at the chance that Miss Wimple's necessity could, under any circumstances, bring forth such an invention, I hope I have only to remind them that that brave angel had become straitened to a point whereat she had neither material from which to erect another quilted petticoat, nor the means of procuring it, even if she could spare the time necessary to the making of one,—which she could not, being now closely occupied between the engagements of her hired needle and the newly-found cares that Charity had imposed upon her.
But, however the probabilities may appear, Miss Wimple's Hoop was a shaved-whalebone fact; and the quilted petticoat would never have been missed, but for the officious scrutiny of the eyes, and the provoking prating of the tongues, of a sophisticated few who marvelled greatly at the pliancy and the "perfect set" of Miss Wimple's Alboni,—"and that demure little prig, too! who'd have thought it?"
As for Simon Blount, he was quick to perceive the new experience to which the skimped delaine had been introduced, and at first it disturbed and embarrassed him; but his light, elastic temper soon recovered its careless buoyancy, with a sly smile at what he considered an oddity, newly discovered, in the character of his prim sweetheart. "Oh! it's all right, of course," he thought; "Sally knows what she's about; but it's very funny!"
And so, if this strange disturbing of the established order of "things" in the kingdom of Wimple had rested with the exaltation of the Hoop, that body politic would presently have been reduced to tranquillity, no doubt, and the all-agogness of Hendrik would have come quietly to nought, like any other popular flutter following upon a new thing under the sun. But in a romantic cause the conscientiousness of Miss Wimple, for all her seeming matter-of-fact, took on a quality of chivalry; and she displayed a Quixotism most tiltfully disposed toward any windmill of conventional proprieties that might plant itself in the way by which her beauteous and distressed damsel was to escape. So, before all the decencies of Hendrik had recovered from the shock of the Hoop, she threw them into a new and worse "conniption" by an even more daring innovation upon their good, easy notions of her; for the next thing she did was—a basque and flounces. Thus it happened:—
Madeline had become quite another Madeline,—say a Magdalen, rather, —under the gentle discipline of her admirable angel. Her wonted distraction had subsided into a pensive sadness, which manifested itself in many a grateful, graceful tenderness toward that glorifier of the skimped delaine. She had observed the Hoop at once, and greeted it with a solitary smile, accepting it for a happy sign and a token; for she had recognized Simon Blount when she turned into the shop, that night, out of the darkness and the cold, and, with the alert intelligence of a woman, even so self-absorbed as she was then, had construed his gallant "good-night." She thought she understood Miss Wimple's Hoop, because she had not discovered the poetry in Miss Wimple's quilted petticoat. They had not spoken of those things again. Delicacy was the law for those two; and to do their best, and thankfully, bravely, accept the first deliverance Heaven might send them, was their religion. Like two Micawbers of Faith, Hope, and Charity, they waited for something to "turn up."