Canada -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Prairie Provinces -- Fiction
Which reminds me of the fact that I find my hair a terrible nuisance,
with no Hortense to struggle with it every morning. As you know, it's as
thick as a rope and as long as my arm. I begrudge the time it takes to
look after it, and such a thing as a good shampoo is an event to be
approached with trepidation and prepared for with zeal. "Coises on me
beauty!" I think I'll cut that wool off. But on each occasion when I
have my mind about made up I experience one of "Mr. Polly's" l'il dog
moments. The thing that makes me hesitate is the thought that Dinky-Dunk
might hate me for the rest of his days. And now that our
department-store aristocracy seems to have a corner in Counts and I seem
destined to worry along with merely an American husband, I don't intend
to throw away the spoons with the dish-water! But having to fuss so with
that hair is a nuisance, especially at night, when I am so tired that my
pillow seems to bark like a dog for me to come and pat it.
And speaking of that reminds me that I have to order arch-supports for
my feet. I'm on them so much that by bedtime my ankles feel like a
_chocolat mousse_ that's been left out in the sun. Yet this isn't a
whimper, Matilda Anne, for when I turn in I sleep like a child. No more
counting and going to the medicine-chest for coal-tar pills. I abjure
them. I, who used to have so many tricks to bring the starry-eyed
goddess bending over my pillow, hereby announce myself as the noblest
sleeper north of the Line! I no longer need to count the sheep as they
come over the wall, or patiently try to imagine the sound of surf-waves,
or laboriously re-design that perennial dinner-gown which I've kept
tucked away in the cedar-chest of the imagination as long as I can
remember, elaborating it over and over again down to the minutest
details through the longest hour of my whitest white night until it
began to merge into the velvety robes of slumber itself! Nowadays an
ogre called Ten-O'Clock steals up behind my chair with a club in his
hand and stuns me into insensibility. Two or three times, in fact, my
dear old clumsy-fingered Dinky-Dunk has helped me get my clothes off.
But he says that the nicest sound he knows is to lie in bed and hear the
tinkle of my hair-pins as I toss them into the little Coalport pin-tray
on my dresser--which reminds me what Chinkie once said about his idea of
Heaven being eating my divinity-fudge to the sound of trumpets!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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