Thus I rode, amphibious and happy, on the top of the coach, with only one person sharing the seat with me, and he fortunately a stranger, and therefore sweet tempered, and a very agreeable and intelligent man, talking sensibly when he talked at all, and talking at all only now and then. Very agreeable and polite; but presently he asked me in courteous phrase if he might smoke, and of course I said yes, and the fragrant white smoke-wreaths mingled with the valley vapors, and as I sat narcotized and rapt, looking, looking, looking into the lovely landscape, and looking it into me, twisting the jagged finger-ends of my gloves around the protruding ends of my fingers,--dreadfully jagged and forlorn the poor gloves looked with their long travel. I don't know how it is, but in all the novels that I ever read, the heroines always have delicate, spotless, exquisite gloves, which are continually lying about in the garden-paths, and which their lovers are constantly picking up and pressing to their hearts and lips, and treasuring in little golden boxes or something, and saying how like the soft glove, pure and sweet, is to the beloved owner; and it is all very pretty, but I cannot think how they manage it. I am sure I should be very sorry to have my lovers go about picking up my gloves. I don't have them a week before they change color; the thumb gapes at its base, the little finger rips away from the next one, and they all burst out at the ends; a stitch drops in the back and slides down to the wrist before you know it has started. You can mend, to be sure, but for every darn yawn twenty holes. I admire a dainty glove as much any one. I look with enthusiasm not unmingled with despair at these gloves of romance; but such things do not depend entirely upon taste, as male writers seem to think. Apair of gloves cost a dollar and a half, and when you have them, your lovers do not find them in the summer-house. Why not? Because they are lying snugly wrapped in oiled-silk in the upper bureau-drawer, only to be taken out on great occasions.
You would as soon think of wearing Victoria's crown for a head-dress, as those gloves on a picnic. So it happens that the gloves your lovers find will be sure to be Lisle-thread, and dingy and battered at that; for how can you pluck flowers and pull vines and tear away mosses without getting them dingy and battered?--and the most fastidious lover in the world cannot expect you to buy a new pair every time. For me, I keep my gloves as long as the backs hold together, and go around for forty-five weeks of the fifty-two with my hands clenched into fists to cover omissions.
Let us not, however, dismiss the subject with this apologetic notice, for there is another side. There is a basis of attack, as well as defence. I not only apologize, but stand up for this much-abused article. Though worn gloves are indeed less beautiful than fresh ones, they have more character. Take one just from the shop, how lank and wan it is,--a perfect monotony of insipidity; but in a day or two it plumps out, it curls over, it wabs up, it wrinkles and bulges and stands alone. All the joints and hollows and curves and motions of your hands speak through its outlines. Twists and rips and scratches and stains bear silent witness of your agitation, your activity, your merry-making. Here breaks through the irrepressible energy of your nature. Let harmless negatives rejoice in their stupid integrity. Genius is expansive and iconoclastic.
Enterprise cannot be confined by kid or thread or silk. The life that is in you must have full swing, even if snap go the buttons and gray go the gloves. Truly, if historians had but eyes to see, the record of one's experience might be written out from the bureau-drawer. Happy a thousand times that historians have not eyes to see.
As to mending gloves, after the first attack it is time lost.
Let one or two pairs, kept for show and state, be irreproachable;but the rest are for service, and everybody knows that little serving can be done with bandaged hands. You must take hold of things without gloves, or, which amounts to the same thing, with gloves that let your fingers through, or you cannot reasonably expect to take hold of things with any degree of efficiency.
