Mrs. Makebelieve’s advice was that she should stifle the first fierce and indiscriminate cravings of the young man’s hunger by a liberal allowance of stirabout, which was a cheap, wholesome, and very satisfying food, and in that way his destruction of more costly victuals would be kept within reasonable limits. Appetite, she held, was largely a matter of youth, and as a boy who was scarcely done growing had no way of modifying his passion for nourishment, it would be a lapse from decency to insult him on so legitimate a failing.
Mrs. Cafferty thought that this might be done, and thanked her friend for the counsel; but Mary, listening to these political matters, conceived Mrs. Cafferty as a person who had no longer any claim to honour, and she pitied the young man whose appetite was thus publicly canvassed, and who might at any moment be turned out of house and home on account of a hunger against which he had no safeguard and no remedy.
XXVII
It was not long until Mary and Mrs. Cafferty’s lodger met. As he came in by the hall door one day Mary was carrying upstairs a large water-bucket, the portage of which two or three times a day is so heavy a strain on the dweller in tenements. The youth instantly seized the bucket, and despite her protestations and appeals, he carried it upstairs. He walked a few steps in advance of Mary, whistling cheerfully as he went, so she was able to get a good view of him. He was so thin that he nearly made her laugh, but he carried the bucket, the weight of which she had often bowed under, with an ease astonishing in so slight a man, and there was a spring in his walk which was pleasant to see. He laid the bucket down outside her room, and requested her urgently to knock at his door whenever she required more water fetched, because he would be only too delighted to do it for her, and it was not the slightest trouble in the world. While he spoke he was stealing glances at her face and Mary was stealing glances at his face, and when they caught one another doing this at the same moment they both looked hurriedly away, and the young man departed to his own place.
But Mary was very angry with this young man. She had gone downstairs in her house attire, which was not resplendent, and she objected to being discovered by any youth in raiment not suitable to such an occasion. She could not visualise herself speaking to a man unless she was adorned as for a festivity. The gentlemen and ladies of whom her mother sometimes spoke, and of whom she had often dreamt, were never mean in their habiliments. The gentlemen frequently had green silken jackets with a foam of lace at the wrists and a cascade of the same rich material brawling upon their breasts, and the ladies were attired in a magnificent scarcity of clothing, the fundamental principle whereof, although she was quite assured of its righteousness, she did not yet understand.
Indeed, at this period Mary’s interest in dress far transcended any interest she had ever known before. She knew intimately the window contents of every costumier’s shop in Grafton and Wicklow and Dawson Streets, and could follow with intelligent amazement the apparently trifling, but exceedingly important, differences of line or seam or flounce which ranked one garment as a creation and its neighbour as a dress. She and her mother often discussed the gowns wherein the native dignity of their souls might be adequately caparisoned. Mrs. Makebelieve, with a humility which had still a trace of anger, admitted that the period when she could have been expressed in colour had expired, and she decided that a black silk dress, with a heavy gold chain falling along the bosom, was as much as her soul was now entitled to. She had an impatience, amounting to contempt, for those florid, flamboyant souls whose outer physical integument so grievously misrepresented them. She thought that after a certain time one should dress the body and not the soul, and, discovering an inseparability between the two, she held that the mean shrine must hold a very trifling deity and that an ill-made or timeworn body should never dress gloriously under pain of an accusation of hypocrisy or foolishness.
But for Mary she planned garments with a freedom and bravery which astonished while it delighted her daughter. She combined twenty styles into one style of terrifying originality. She conceived dresses of a complexity beyond the labour of any but a divinely inspired needle, and others again whose simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech. She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, and she had heard of a dress the fabric whereof was of such gossamer and ethereal insubstancy that it might be packed into a walnut more conveniently than an ordinary dress could be impressed into a portmanteau. Mary’s exclamations of delight and longing ranged from every possible dress to every impossible one, and then Mrs. Makebelieve reviewed all the dresses she had worn from the age of three years to the present day, including wedding and mourning dresses, those which were worn at picnics and dances and for travelling, with an occasional divergence which comprehended the clothing of her friends and her enemies during the like period. She explained the basic principles of dress to her daughter, showing that in this art, as in all else, order cannot
