Barton knew she was aging but fought it. Privately she conceded that “there is a lack of coordination between the brain and the limbs,” but publicly she resented any allusion to her age. She disliked giving away recent photographs of herself and wished people would accept pictures of her in “strong middle life.” She also fooled nature—and many people—by artistically covering her age. A young relative was amazed to find that Aunt Clara “was very particular about her make-up and in those days there were few people who dared use creams and rouge and powder, but Aunt Clara used them skillfully and the result was most amazingly good. She looked years younger when she had finished ... and her eyebrows were treated with a pencil, if you please. “Next came the combing of her coal black hair which, by the way, had been dyed. Mother told me once when she was with Aunt Clara when she was sick for a long period and couldn’t have her hair attended to, it was lovely and white, but she would not have it so and wore it dyed black to the very last. “After her face and hair were finished ... [she] put on her waist, but before buttoning it down the front, she stuffed tissue paper all across the front to make a nice rounded bust.” She was, in many ways, an eccentric figure. Visitors were amused to see her weed the garden, her chest plastered with the decorations of foreign governments. She was always an individual in matters of dress, but her costumes became more unusual in her later years. Her favorite dress color was green and she enjoyed wearing a dash of red. One outfit had five ill-matching shades of green for skirt, sleeves, collar and bodice, two kinds of lace, red ribbon, “and about the bottom ... was a strip of the most awful old motheaten beaver fur, about six inches wide.” Financially, she was quite well off, but in the best New England tradition she practiced economy in all things. When a part of her dress wore out, she apparently replaced it with whatever material was on hand. Most of Clara Barton’s friends and family died before her, and in her last years she was often lonely. She sometimes thought her achievements were worthless beside the importance of friendship. “_What matters the praise of the world?_” Barton asked herself in her journal on February 6, 1907, “_and what matter after we leave it especially? How hollow is that thing called fame._”