A WOMAN'S POCKET.
THE most difficult thing to reach is a woman's pocket. This is especially
the case if the dress is hung up in a closet, and the man is in a hurry.
We think we are safe in saying that he always is in a hurry on such an occasion.
The owner of the dress is in the sitting-room, serenely engrossed in a book.
Having told him that the article which he is in quest of is in her dress-pocket
in the closet, she has discharged her whole duty in the matter, and can afford
to feel serene. He goes at the task with a dim consciousness that he has
been there before, but says nothing. On opening the closet-door, and finding
himself confronted with a number of dresses, all turned inside out, and
presenting a most formidable front, he hastens back to ask, "Which dress?"
and being told the brown one, and also asked if she has so many
dresses that there need be any great effort to find the right one, he returns
to the closet with alacrity, and soon has his hands on the brown dress. It
is inside out,
like the rest,—a fact he does not notice, however, until
he has made several ineffectual attempts to get his hand into it. Then he
turns it around very carefully, and passes over the pocket several times
without being aware of it. A nervous moving of his hands and an appearance
of perspiration on his forehead are perceptible. He now dives one hand in
at the back, and, feeling around, finds a place, and proceeds to explore
it, when he discovers that he is following up the inside of a lining. The
nervousness increases, also the perspiration. He twitches the dress on the
hook; and suddenly the pocket, white, plump, and exasperating, comes to view.
Then he sighs the relief he feels, and is mentally grateful he did not allow
himself to use any offensive expressions. It is all right now. There is the
pocket in plain view,—not the inside, but the outside,—and all he has to
do is to put his hand right around in the inside, and take out the article.
That is all. He can't help but smile to think how near he was to getting
mad. Then he puts his hand around to the other side. He does not feel the
opening. He pushes a little farther. Now he has got it. He shoves the hand
down, and is very much surprised to see it appear opposite his knees. He
had made a mistake. He tries again: again he feels the entrance, and glides
down it, only to appear again as before. This makes him open his eyes, and
straighten his face. He feels of the
outside of the pocket, pinches it curiously,
lifts it up, shakes it, and, after peering closely about the roots of it,
he says, "By gracious!" and commences again. He does it calmly this time,
because hurrying only makes matters worse. He holds up breadth after breadth;
goes over them carefully; gets his hand first into a lining, then into the
air again (where it always surprises him when it appears), and finally into
a pocket, and is about to cry out with triumph, when he discovers that it
is the pocket to another dress. He is mad now. The closet air almost stifles
him. He is so nervous, he can hardly contain himself; and the pocket looks
at him so exasperatingly, that he cannot help but "plug" it with his clinched
fist, and immediately does it. Being somewhat relieved by this performance,
he has a chance to look about him, and sees that he has put his foot through
a bandbox, and into the crown of his wife's bonnet; has broken the brim to
his Panama hat, which was hanging in the same closet; and torn about a yard
of bugle-trimming from a new cloak. As all this trouble is due directly to
his wife's infatuation in hanging up her dresses inside out, he immediately
starts after her, and, impetuously urging her to the closet, excitedly and
almost profanely intimates his doubts of there being a pocket in the dress
anyway. The cause of the unhappy disaster quietly inserts her hand inside
the robe, and directly brings it forth
with the sought-for article in its
clasp. He doesn't know why; but this makes him madder than any thing else.
