Faith Gartney's GirlhoodWhitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
General
Faith Gartney's Girlhood
Whitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
Teenage girls -- Juvenile fiction
Glory curled the baby's hair, and made him "look pretty." Mrs. Grubbling
cut her little handmaid's short to save trouble; so that the very
determined yellow locks which, under more favoring circumstances of
place and fortune, might have been trained into lovely golden curls,
stood up continually in their restless reaching after the fairer destiny
that had been meant for them, in the old fuzz-ball fashion; and Glory
grew more and more to justify her name.
Do you think she didn't know what beauty was--this child who never had a
new or pretty garment, but who wore frocks "fadged up" out of old, faded
breadths of her mistress's dresses, and bonnets with brims cut off and
topknots taken down, and coarse shoes, and stockings cut out of the
legs of those whereof Mrs. Grubbling had worn out the extremities? Do
you think she didn't feel the difference, and that it wasn't this that
made her shuffle along so with her toes in, when she sped along the
streets upon her manifold errands, and met gentle-people's children
laughing and skipping their hoops upon the sidewalks?
Out of all lives, actual and possible, each one of us appropriates
continually into his own. This is a world of hints only, out of which
every soul seizes to itself what it needs.
This girl, uncherished, repressed in every natural longing to be and to
have, took in all the more of what was possible; for God had given her
this glorious insight, this imagination, wherewith we fill up life's
scanty outline, and grasp at all that might be, or that elsewhere, is.
In her, as in us all, it was often--nay, daily--a discontent; yet a
noble discontent, and curbed with a grand, unconscious patience. She
scoured her knives; she shuffled along the streets on hasty errands; she
went up and down the house in her small menial duties; she put on and
off her coarse, repulsive clothing; she uttered herself in her common,
ignorant forms of speech; she showed only as a poor, low, little Irish
girl with red hair and staring, wondering eyes, and awkward movements,
and a frightened fashion of getting into everybody's way; and yet,
behind all this, there was another life that went on in a hidden beauty
that you and I cannot fathom, save only as God gives the like, inwardly,
to ourselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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