University of Virginia Library

45. CHAPTER XLV.
MY WIFE'S WARDROBE.

LET not the reader imagine by the paragraph on
Saratoga trunks that my little wife had done
what the Scripture assumes is the impossibility
for womankind, and as a bride forgotten her attire.

Although possessing ideas of great moderation, she had
not come to our mountain home without the appropriate
armor of womanhood.

I interpreted the duties of a husband after the directions
of Michelet, and was my wife's only maid, and in all
humility performed for her the office of packing and unpacking
her trunks, and handling all those strange and
wonderful mysteries of the toilet, which seemed to my eyes
penetrated with an ineffable enchantment.

I have been struck with dismay of late, in reading the
treatises of some very clever female reformers concerning
the dress of the diviner sex.

It is really in contemplation among them to reduce it
to a level as ordinary and prosaic as it occupies among
us men, heavy-footed sons of toil? Are sashes and bows,
and neck-ribbons and tiny slippers and gloves to give
way to thick-soled boots and buckskin gauntlets and
broadcloth coats? To me my wife's wardrobe was a
daily poem, and from her use of it I derived the satisfaction
of faculties which had lain dormant under my heavy
black broadcloth, like the gauzy tissue under the black
horn wings of a poor beetle. I never looked at the splendid
pictures of Paul Veronese and Titian in the Venetian
galleries, without murmuring at the severe edicts

of modern life which sends every man forth on the tide
of life, like a black gondola condemned to one unvarying
color. Those gorgeous velvets in all the hues of the
rainbow, those dainty laces and splendid gems, which
once were allowed to us men, are all swept away, and
for us there remains no poetry of dress. Our tailor turns
us out a suit in which one is just like another with scarce
an individual variation.

The wife, then, the part of one's self which marriage
gives us, affords us a gratification of these suppressed
faculties. She is our finer self; and in her we appreciate
and enjoy what is denied to us. I freely admit the
truth of what women-reformers tell us, that it is the admiration
of us men that stimulates the love of dress in
women. It is a fact—I confess it with tears in my eyes—
but it is the truth, that we are blindly enchanted by that
play of fancy and poetry in their externals, which is forever
denied to us; and that we look with our indulgent
eyes even on what the French statesman calls their “fureurs
de toilette.

In fact, woman's finery never looks to another woman as
it does to a man. It has to us a charm, a sacredness, that
they cannot comprehend.

Under my wife's instruction I became an expert guardian
of these filmy treasures of the wardrobe, and knew
how to fold and unfold, and bring her everything in its
place, as she daily performed for me the charming work
of making up her toilet. To be sure, my slowness and
clumsiness brought me many brisk little lectures, but my
good will and docility were so great that my small sovereign
declared herself on the whole satisfied with my progress.
There was a vapory collection apparently made up
of bits and ends of rainbows, flosses of clouds, spangles of
stars, butterflies and humming-bird's wings, which she
turned and tossed over daily, with her dainty fingers,
selecting a bit here and a morsel there, which went to
her hair, or her neck, or her girdle, with a wonderful

appropriateness, and in a manner to me wholly incomprehensible;
only the result was a new picture every
day. This little, artless tableau was expensive neither
of time nor money, and the result was a great deal of
very honest pleasure to us both. It was her pride to be
praised and admired first by me, and then by my mother,
and aunt, and uncle Jacob, who turned her round and admired
her, as if she had been some rare tropical flower.

Now, do the very alarmingly rational women-reformers
I speak of propose to forbid to women in the future all
the use of clothes except that which is best adapted to
purposes of work? Is the time at hand when the veil
and orange flowers and satin slippers of the bride shall
melt away into mist, and shall we behold at the altar the
union of young parties, dressed alike in swallow-tailed
coats and broadcloth pantaloons, with brass buttons?

If this picture seems absurd, then, it must be admitted
that there is a reason in nature why the dress of woman
should forever remain different from that of man, in the
same manner that the hand of her Creator has shaped her
delicate limbs and golden hair differently from the rugged
organization of man. Woman was meant to be more than
a worker; she was meant for the poet and artist of life;
she was meant to be the charmer; and that is the reason,
dear Miss Minerva, why to the end of time you cannot help
it that women always will, and must, give more care and
thought to dress than men.

To be sure, this runs into a thousand follies and extravagances;
but in this as in everything else the remedy
is not extirpation, but direction.

Certainly my pretty wife's pretty toilets had a success
in our limited circle, which might possibly have been
denied in fashionable society at Saratoga and Newport.
She was beauty, color, and life to our little world, and
followed by almost adoring eyes wherever she went. It
was as real an accession of light and joy to the simple
ways of our household to have her there, as a choice

picture, or a marvelous strain of music. My wife had
to perfection the truly artistic gift of dress. Had she
lived in Robinson Crusoe's island with no one to look
at her but the paroquets and the monkeys, and with no
mirror but a pool of water, she would have made a careful
toilet every day, from the mere love of beauty; and
it was delightful to see how a fresh, young, charming
woman, by this faculty of adornment, seemed to make
the whole of the sober, old house like a picture or a
poem.

“She is like the blossom on a cactus,” said my Uncle
Jacob. “We have come to our flower, in her; we have it
in us; we all like it, but she brings it out; she is our blossom,”

In fact, it was charming to see the delight of the two
sober, elderly matrous, my mother and my aunt, in turning
over and surveying the pretty things of her toilet.
My mother, with all her delicate tastes and love of fineness
and exquisiteness, had lived in these respects the
self-denied life of a poor country minister, who never
has but one “best pocket handkerchief,” and whom one
pair of gloves must last through a year. It was a fresh
little scene of delight to see the two way-worn matrons
in the calm, silvery twilight of their old age, sitting like
a pair of amicable doves on the trunks in our room,
while my wife displayed to them all her little store of
fineries, and all three chatted them over with as whole-hearted
a zeal as if finery were one of the final ends in
creation.

Every morning it was a part of the family breakfast to
admire some new device of berries or blossoms adapted
to her toilet. Now, it was knots of blue violets, and now
clusters of apple blossoms, that seemed to adapt themselves
to the purpose, as if they had been made for it.
In the same manner she went about the house filling all
possible flower vases with quaint and original combinations
of leaves and blossoms till the house bloomed like a
garland.

Then there were days when I have the vision of my wife
in calico dress and crisp white apron, taking lessons in
ornamental housewifery of my mother and aunt in the
great, clean kitchen. There the three proceeded with all
care and solemnity to perform the incantations out of
which arose strange savory compounds of cakes and confections,
whose recipes were family heir-looms. Out of
great platters of egg-whites, whipped into foamy masses,
these mystical dainties arose, as of old rose Venus from the
foam of the sea.

I observe that the elderly priestesses in the temple of
domestic experience, have a peculiar pride and pleasure
in the young neophyte that seeks admission to these Eleusinian
mysteries.

Eva began to wear an air of precocious matronly gravity,
as she held long discourses with my mother and aunt on
all the high mysteries of household ways, following them
even to the deepest recesses of the house where they displayed
to her their hidden treasures of fine linen and
napery, and drew forth gifts wherewith to enrich our
future home.

In the olden times the family linen of a bride was of
her own spinning and that of her mother and kinswomen;
so that every thread in it had a sacredness of family life
and association. One can fancy dreams of peace could
come in a bed, every thread of whose linen has been
spun by loving and sainted hands. So, the gift to my wife
from my mother was some of this priceless old linen,
every piece of which had its story. These towels were
spun by a beloved aunt Avis, whose life was a charming
story of faith and patience; and those sheets and pillowcases
were the work of my mother's mother; they had been
through the history of a family life, and came to us
fragrant with rosemary and legend. We touched them
with reverence, as the relics of ascended saints.

Then there were the family receipt books, which had a
quaint poetry of their own. I must confess, in the face of

the modern excellent printed manuals of cookery and
housekeeping, a tenderness for these old-fashioned receipt
books of our mothers and grandmothers, yellow with age,
where in their own handwriting are the records of their
attainments and discoveries in the art of making life
healthful and charming. There was a loving carefulness
about these receipts—an evident breathing of human experience
and family life—they were entwined with so many
associations of the tastes and habits of individual members
of the family, that the reading of my mother's receipt-book
seemed to bring back all the old pictures of home-life;
and this precious manual she gave to Eva, who forthwith
resolved to set up one of her own on the model of it.

In short, by the time our honeymoon had passed, Eva
regarded herself as a passed mistress in the grand free
masonry of home life, and assumed toward me those
grave little airs of instruction blent with gracious condescension
for male inferiority which obtain among good
wives. She began to be my little mother no less than
wife.

My mother and aunt were confident of her success and
abilities as queen in her new dominions. It was evident
that though a city girl and a child of wealth and fashion,
she had what Yankee matrons are pleased to denominate
“faculty,” which is, being interpreted, a genius for home
life, and she was only impatient now to return to her realm
and set up her kingdom.