OMEN WHO PUT ON AIRS[14]

I can't say just how many walks she (the schoolmistress) and I had
taken together before this one. I found the effect of going out every
morning was decidedly favorable on her health. Two pleasing dimples,
the places for which were just marked when she came, played, shadowy,
in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to me
from the schoolhouse steps.

[Footnote 14: From Part XI of "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table."
Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.]

I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any rate, if I
should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen walks
we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint from my
friends the publishers that a separate volume, at my own risk and
expense, would be the proper method of bringing them before the
public.

I would have a woman as true as death. At the first real lie which
works from the heart outward she should be tenderly chloroformed into
a better world, where she can have an angel for a governess, and feed
on strange fruits which will make her all over again, even to her
bones and marrow. Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not,
she should have been molded in the rose-red clay of love before the
breath of life made a moving mortal of her. Love capacity is a
congenital endowment; and I think, after a while, one gets to know the
warm-hued natures it belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits
of it. Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but
pride, in the sense of contemning others less gifted than herself,
deserves the two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the
punishments are smallpox and bankruptcy. She who nips off the end of a
brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to bestow upon
those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize, proclaims the
fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of bad blood.
Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people gracious in proper
measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with her real equals, she
has something about herself or her family she is ashamed of, or ought
to be. Middle, and more than middle-aged people, who know family
histories, generally see through it. An official of standing was rude
to me once. "Oh, that is the maternal grandfather," said a wise old
friend to me, "he was a boor." Better too few words, from the woman we
love, than too many: