Between Sizes

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IT had been lurking vaguely in the background of consciousness for a long time, like a decomposed thing trying to gather itself together. And the tailor did it. I knew, as I looked into his complex eye, that I was on the eve of an event. I felt, as Celia Thaxter felt, the Something about to Happen when the red-headed, cross-eyed elevator boy asked in doomful accents, “ Are you ready ? ”

I looked again at the tailor. He, too, had eyes which were trying to embrace all the universe in one glance. I felt he held me in the hollow of his hand. His lips opened, and he said in tones fraught with teleological awfulness, “ You are between sizes.” The truth was known. It had come at last. My destiny was sealed. The tailor had said it. I was between sizes !

The fact that a little padding here and there would set me right in the eyes of an undiscriminating world was of no consolation to me. My body might be fixed up on the lines of a fashionplate, but myself— my real ego — was, I knew, between sizes. I had felt it dimly for years, but now I saw no more through a glass darkly.

Wearily I dragged myself out of the tailor’s cramped shop, and sought the coolness of the Gardens in their spring array of flaunting tulips. There, seated on one of the benches full of humanity between sizes, I drew in deep breaths of sweet spring air, and gave myself to retrospection in the midst of the new life around me.

My brain was soon disposed of. Obviously a thing that could conceive the absurdities that my brain had conceived was not wholly blameworthy. It was only between sizes. That I had failed to write the novel which in the planning was so subtle, so typical, so everything it ought to be, merging finally into a monstrosity of literary style, — which was a cross between that of Mrs. Humphry Ward and that of Charlotte M. Braeme, — was not strange. What else could the poor brain do ?

And my heart — why was it that it beat so passionately when it should be gay, and so flippantly when it should be sad ? Why did it open itself so utterly to the need of one, and become dull and dead to the cry of one more worthy, perhaps ? There were a dozen poor human things pressing close, to which it gave not one response of sympathy; and yet there in the crowd, so closed in upon that it required effort to find her out, was a girl with a light in her eyes that set every feeling found in love for humanity burning with ceaseless fire.

No ; I was not even that which in the last extremity one is usually called ; — I was not “ good-hearted.” My heart, too, was between sizes.