The American Child, page 49 by Elizabeth McCracken
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beings, as a whole, seem unable not to be awkward in their behavior if their costumes can possibly be differentiated otherwise than by size!"
It is another queer fact that normal persons would seem to require "best" clothes. They share the spirit of Jess, in "A Window in Thrums." "But you could never wear yours, though ye had ane," said Hendry to her about the "cloak with beads"; "ye would juist hae to lock it awa in the drawers." "Aye," Jess retorted, "but I would aye ken it was there."
I have an acquaintance who is not normal in this matter. She scorns "finery," whether for use or for "locking awa." One summer she and I spent a fortnight together on a Connecticut farm. During the week the farmer and his wife, as well as their two little children, a girl and a boy, wore garments of dark-colored denim very plainly made. The children were barefooted.
"These people have sense," my acquaintance observed to me on the first day of our sojourn; "they dress in harmony with their environment."
I was silent, realizing that, if Sunday were a fine day, she might feel compelled to modify her approbation. On Saturday night the farmer asked if we should care to accompany the family to church the next morning. Both of us accepted the invitation.
Sunday morning, as I had foreseen, when the family assembled to take its places in the "three-seater," the father was in "blacks," with a "boiled" shirt; the mother, a pretty dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman, a pleasant picture in the most every-day of garments, was a charming sight, in a rose-tinted wash silk and a Panama hat trimmed with black velvet. As for the boy and the girl, they were arrayed in spotless white, from their straw hats even to their canvas shoes. The hands of the farmer and his son were uncovered; but the mother and her little daughter wore white lisle gloves. They also carried parasols--the mother's of the shade of her dress, the girl's pale blue. No family in America could possibly have looked more "blithe and bonny" than did t