The Doll-Babies' Dresses

WHY do people overeat so on life, grabbing and stretching after Gargantuan gobbles, when there within the reach of all are such small delicious mouthfuls? Take, for instance, the doll-babies’ dresses.

I am writing from the Southern mountains, where dolls are never just dolls, but always doll-babies. Out in the wide and hasty world, words, like puppy dogs, get their tails bitten off; churches are just churches, whereas in many of our mountains they are still church-houses.

Well, then, two little girls, Doris and Margaret, brought in their doll-babies for our inspection, and one was ‘Gladys’ and one was ‘Betty.’ After being duly impressed by their size and beauty, we asked if the children would like some new dresses for them — with ribbons, we hinted. The little girls’ eyes flashed up to their mother’s face to see if this was all right, and it was! So they breathed shy ‘Yes, mams,’ and slipped softly away. Out in their own domain, however, Doris whispered into her child’s china ear that she was to ‘have a brand-new dress all fixed up with pretty little ribbons’; then, suddenly aware that this tender maternal confidence was being overheard by grown-ups, she fell into an agony of confusion.

We made a special trip to the county town. Oh, of course we invented some large, important excuse to take us, but very well we knew we went for nothing but the doll-babies’ dresses. There we found pink dotted Swiss, yellow dotted Swiss, ribbons for sawdust waists, white lawn for the intimate garments — and at last, to-day, the dresses were finished. There in our sitting room the doll-babies sat side by side in a stiff Windsor chair awaiting the supreme moment of their mothers’ return from school. Gladys was in pink, Betty in yellow; a pink hat on one head, a yellow hat on the other; white sashes for both waists. Very crisp and proud and perfect they were, and very conscious of it, and many a lady of the olden time has been a belle on no more. Fortunate doll-babies! All dressed up and somewhere to go — straight into their own mothers’ arms.

Through the whole bright afternoon there twinkled an air of festivity and mirth. With Gladys and Betty sitting there so crisp, so proud, so prim, so perfect, and so aware of it, the hours danced past with a secret joke all their own. We grown-ups laughed together more easily, and over less, and had I an enemy I could not have hated him to-day. I should only have had to look at the perfect doll-babies, their hats a trifle over one ear, to laugh. And who can really laugh and hate? The children’s grandmother came to call. ’Look at your greatgrandchildren,’ I said, introducing them. She flung out her hand in a wide salute, and swept them an elaborate bow. But Gladys and Betty did not so much as bat an eyelid — they were afraid their bonnets would fall off! That was the one and only thing on earth that really worried them.

At last the great moment arrived — the mothers were home from school. They came in, and the doll-babies burst upon their sight, in their Windsor chair, in their dotted Swiss, their bonnets, their sashes — the mothers saw their children, and in one glance were stricken dumb. What was to us so small and gay a mouthful of life was to them so large a bite, so wonderful, so choked with rapture, that they could find no words with which to swallow it down. But what are words compared to small faces dumb with delight; little bobbed heads, a light one, a dark one, turning from side to side on slender neck stems in utter ecstasy?

For a long moment they could only stand and stare, but at last they dared to touch, to slide half-frightened fingers down crisp dresses and ribbon bows, to peep beneath at lace and lawn — finally to pick them up, to have them in their very own arms. The doll-babies rode away on their mothers’ shoulders, looking back at us still deeply conscious of their own perfection, and still a trifle worried over their bonnets. So they vanished from our life, and something vanished with them. A door closed. The room fell back into a prosaic grown-up sitting room, but for one bright hour our guests had lifted it up, spangled it with laughter and a secret joy.

Out in the wide hurly-burly of the world, kingdoms rise and fall; humans snatch and grab and gobble, both feet in the trough of life; but for us to-day has been nothing but the day of the doll-babies’ dresses. A small, wholly unimportant mouthful — but was it? Gladys and Betty and their bonnets will remain a little point of mirth in my mind like a plum in a pudding; and the memory of the children’s little uplifted faces will linger forever as something even more precious. For, through the whimsical portals of dotted Swiss, did we not enter again for an instant the land of childhood? And, for that, who would not gladly pay as gate money a wisp of lawn, a shimmer of ribbon?