This is thrift. This
is economy. But, alas! few people understand the art of living. They
strive after system, wholeness, buttons, and neglect the weightier
matters of the higher law.
--I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again. I started for
Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket. As I know no good in
tracing the same road back, we may as well strike a bee-line and begin
new at Fontdale.
We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining. I have a veil, a beautiful--_have_,
did I say? Alas! Troy _was_. But I must not anticipate--a beautiful veil
of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only for
penance, but a silken gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's check. Yet
everybody fleers at it. Everybody has a joke about it. Everybody looks
at it, and holds it out at arms' length, and shakes it, and makes great
eyes at it, and says, "What in the world"--, and ends with a huge,
bouncing laugh. Why? One is ashamed of human nature at being forced to
confess. Because, to use a Gulliverism, it is longer by the breadth of
my nail than any of its contemporaries. In fact, it is two yards long.
That is all. Halicarnassus fired the first gun at it by saying that its
length was to enable one end of it to remain at home while the other end
went with me, so that neither of us should get lost.
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