whereof, although she was quite assured of its
righteousness, she did not yet understand.

Indeed, at this period Mary's interest in dress far transcended any
interest she had ever known before. She knew intimately the window
contents of every costumier's shop in Grafton and Wicklow and Dawson
streets, and could follow with intelligent amazement the apparently
trifling, but exceedingly important, differences of line or seam or
flounce which ranked one garment as a creation and its neighbor as a
dress. She and her mother often discussed the gowns wherein the
native dignity of their souls might be adequately caparisoned. Mrs.
Makebelieve, with a humility which had still a trace of anger,
admitted that the period when she could have been expressed in color
had expired, and she decided that a black silk dress, with a heavy
gold chain falling along the bosom, was as much as her soul was now
entitled to. She had an impatience, amounting to contempt, for those
florid flamboyant souls whose outer physical integument so grievously
misrepresented them. She thought that after a certain time one should
dress the body and not the soul, and, discovering an inseparability
between the two, she held that the mean shrine must hold a very
trifling deity and that an ill-made or time-worn body should never
dress gloriously under pain of an accusation of hypocrisy or
foolishness.

But for Mary she planned garments with a freedom and bravery which
astonished while it delighted her daughter. She combined twenty styles
into one style of terrifying originality. She conceived dresses of a
complexity beyond the labor of any but a divinely inspired needle, and
others again whose simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech.
She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with
difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, and she had heard of
a dress the fabric whereof was of such gossamer and ethereal
insubstancy that it might be packed into a walnut more conveniently
than an ordinary dress could be impressed into a portmanteau. Mary's
exclamations of delight and longing ranged from every possible dress
to every impossible one, and then Mrs. Makebelieve reviewed all the
dresses she had worn from the age of three years to the present day,
including wedding and mourning dresses, those which were worn at
picnics and dances and for traveling, with an occasional divergence
which comprehended the clothing of her friends and