Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and
bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers
in the house, I refused to be carried down to bid that unanswering face
good-bye? No, I have no regret on that score. The older I grow the more
closely I seem to understand him. If phantoms of memory have any
reality--and it is wiser, I think, to remember the face of the living
rather than the stony peace of the dead--he has not forgotten his only
daughter.
Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with
arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized
humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of
these differences I have to submit. At times I have been tempted to
blame my parents for my shortcomings. What wicked folly--they did not
choose their only child. After all, too, fellow creatures of any size
seem much alike. They rarely have _nothing_ to blame Providence for--the
length of their noses or the size of their feet, their bones or their
corpulence, the imbecilities of their minds or their bodies, the
"accidents" of birth, breeding, station, or circumstance. Yet how secure
and perhaps wholesome is Man's self-satisfaction. To what ideal does he
compare himself but to a self-perfected abstraction of his own image?
Even his Venus and Apollo are mere flattering reflections of his own he-
or she-shapes. And what of his anthropomorphic soul?
As for myself, Dame Nature may some day take a fancy to the dwarf. "What
a pretty play it would be"--I have clean forgotten where I chanced on
this amusing passage--"What a pretty play it would be if, from the next
generation onwards, the only humans born into the world should be of
mere pygmy stature. Fifty years hence there would remain but few of the
normal-sized in the land. Imagine these aged few, miserably stalking
through the dwarfed streets, picking up a scanty livelihood in city or
country-side, where their very boots would be a public danger, their
very tread would set the bells in the steeples ringing, and their
appetites would be a national incubus. House, shop, church, high road,
furniture, vehicles abandoned or sunken to the pygmy size; wars and
ceremonies, ambitions and enterprises, everything but prayers, dwindled
to the petty. Would great-grandfather be venerated, cherished, admired,
a welcome guest, a lamented emigrant? Would there be as many mourners as
sextons at his funeral, as many wreaths as congratulations at his
grave?" And so on and so forth--like Jonathan Swift.
But I must beware. Partly from fatigue and partly from dislike of the
version of Miss M. that stared out of his picture at me, I had begun, I
remember, to be a little fretful when old Mr Wagginhorne was painting my
portrait. And I complained pertly that I thought there were far too many
azaleas on the potted bush.
"Ah, little Miss Finical," he said, "take care, if you please. Once
there was a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub and fed on his own
spleen. He died.... He died," he repeated, drawing his brush slowly
along the canvas, "of dyspepsia."