Louise Imogen Guiney

								

latter extraneous servitors as personified faculties of her own. The
act of vision she ascribed to her spectacles alone, and took a never
diminished joy in reminding you how Thackeray did it before her.
“If one dastard of a misplaced comma has escaped me,” she writes, of
printers’ proofs corrected to the last degree of accuracy, “these
spectacles fail to find it.”
Upon one victorious error, chased down and down and still cropping up
in the last proof, she declares:
“Tragedy! how could it have come about? I’d give my spectacles to know.”
Probably nobody so unspoiled and humble in willingness to share
the common lot, or with less respect for the subterfuge called
temperament, ever had less practical acquaintance with the domestic
functions exalted into dull shibboleths, or was more irreconcilably
estranged from the art of the modiste and the rites whereby the
incomprehensible gods of “style” are commonly propitiated. If you could
boil an egg acceptably and enliven it with an agreeable quota of salt
and pepper, she would have made you cordon bleu on the spot. That
the sleeve of a garment could be removed by the simple adjunct of a
pair of scissors and replaced again with a symmetry more conformable
to the arm, was a mystery before which she frankly quailed, and any
force of self-confidence she might have brought to bear went down
like nine-pins. Running rivers of verse, pinnacles of dates, names,
cosmogonies of thrones, principalities and powers, found room in that
exquisitely ordered world which was her brain: yet you could throw her
into a cold sweat of apprehension by confronting her with some homely
task or implement as familiar to the Marthas of civil life as the use
of fork and spoon. And this was no affectation of sensitiveness to
crumpled rose leaves, no arrogance of privilege. She had an appetite as
responsive to good things as if their chemistry had not been as dark to
her as that of lost elixirs, and for some inconspicuous ribbon of her
dress she would cherish an affection almost poignant in its childlike
intensity. She was herself alternately petrified and convulsed by
accumulating instances of her unfitness for the monstrous requisitions
of a concrete world. Returning again and again to the assault, she
is uniformly worsted. She sees, with an eye momentarily sharpened
to recognition, in a modest kitchen, the commonest adjuncts to
dishwashing, and leaves early that she may buy the duplicates of the
magic implements and set them up before the gods of home. And forthwith
she writes, in a rollicking delight:
“And behold! their like had been in this house from of old, and I was
subject to much scorn.”
Helpful kindness itself, she dashes into town to buy a flannel wrapper
for an exacting old lady for whom she has a kindness and who is sick
and destitute, and next day explains, between helpless gusts, “those
spectacles” dashed with tears:
“And lo! it should have been a female garment and I bought a male.”