The Quiet Corner

...Recently in my readings of the biography of Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, the Tenth Muse of Mexican poetry, I encountered her naive description of youthful vanities before she entered the convent and achieved the sanctity in which she died...

...The two girls are blessed with the shock of golden hair that has long been traditional in the women of our family, and they are demanding permission of their mother to have it bobbed...

...But those two fetching girls of hers, Scylla and Charybdis, have fallen into the habit of appealing to me in their household differences with their mother, a lady decidedly of the old school who is fighting tooth and nail against the modernist proclivities of the younger generation...

...do speak for us, dear Doctor, and tell mother it is quite proper for us to cut off these foolish ringlets.' "They are sweet girls, so what could I do but turn to Cousin Ann and say: 'My dear Andromache (that is the way she has registered herself in the society Blue Book) there is some reason in what the girls desire...

...I have a distinct recollection of your own hair with a naughty little bang on the day you married Cousin Hephaestus...

...It seemed to me that Cousin Andromache was not as cordial as usual when I came to say good-night and I fear for my cold-cuts and Lea and Perrins on next Sunday evening...

...today one bobs in the feminine world...

...on occasions of particular solemnity...

...Adbul Fazl in his chronicle relates that in 1578 Akbar ordered the incarceration of some twenty or thirty suckling infants in an establishment where no civilized speech could reach them, with honest and active guards put over them and only tongue-tied wet nurses allowed to function for them...

...n "I have been wondering, Britannicus," said Doctor Angelicus, putting down the heavy tome of Akbarnama by Abdul Fazl, translated by H. Beveridge, "as to what would happen to our novelists, playwrights and poets if they were shut out of the public libraries and the associations of cheap gossips and left quite to their own ingenuities...

...dare I suggest a picture of Madame de Pompadour or even George Washington without their headgears...

...We are_ most unhappy about it...

...For it did not seem right that a head should be covered with locks when it was empty of brains which should be its real ornament...

...She confesses that "although endowed with the appetite that is so strong in children, I abstained from eating cheese as somebody had told me that it made one coarse...

...Nevertheless, I careened softly into this new whirlpool, saying: " 'Now Scylla and Charybdis represent the jeune siecle movement, the school of the ever new penetrating the ever old...

...For I read in history that he spoke with Father Francis Xavier, now the canonized Jesuit hero, of his efforts to test the quality of enlightenment that was putting itself forward at his court...

...So intense was my application that (although the hair of women, especially in their youth, is so prized an ornament) I cut off four or six fingers width, marking its original- length and resolving that when it grew again to a point beyond which I did not intend to have it, I should cut it again and again to keep it from becoming untidy...

...We are all children of our own times, and I confess to using a bit of brilliantine over my own poor ear...

...Do I need to remind you of the transformations and the Janice Meredith curls that are still worn by certain members of your Afternoon Literary Club?' "There was some giggling at this from the young ladies, which should have warned me to desist from my line of argument, and sip a comfortable mouthful of Cousin Ann's tea...

...She refused (and very wisely) but I avenged myself in reading the various books that my uncle had in plenty...

...but the desire of learning was stronger in me than hunger...

...it is true that you and I date from a period when Princess Alexandra led the fashion of frizzled helmets and later on the hairdressers stuck rats of Chinese growth under the shrinking forefronts of Aunt Eliza and Cousin Mignonette...

...But beauty has ever enlisted my lance, so that I have always begged off from my jury duty, knowing my weakness before lovely plaintiffs and the jeopardy to my principles so chivalrously involved...

...THE LIBRARIAN...

...for knowing how to read and write, as well as being accomplished in my household duties and sewing, I heard that there were universities and schools where sciences were studied in Mexico...

...We are the only girls in our class who are not bobbed, but mother declares that our long hair is ladylike and is our crowning glory...

...her most ancient portraits represent her without the chignon or those netted bags that give a horrible marsupial effect in our family collection of daguerreotypes to the sweet faces they hang behind...

...Then I began to implore my mother, that clothing me like a man, she should send me to Mexico City...

...our new saint, Joan of Arc, certainly had few afternoons to devote to the washing and combing of her tresses...

...Some years later, in 1582, when he went with a few attendants to the place which was known as the Gang-Mahal or dumb-house, he found his nurslings, in spite of their four or five years' growth, 'quite without the talisman of speech and nothing came out except the noise of the dumb.' "Oh, that we might have such schools of journalism, such nurseries of originality and genius—'to give us pause!'—to show us what tradition and civilization have done for us and to confuse the young colt that kicks the mare, its mother, so merrily in these latter years...

...In the cloister we have had the invariable practice of shearing the tresses, with, of course a religious as well as practical intent...

...My own weariness and boredom at their persistent claims to originality seem to have been shared by the great Akbar of India...

...under the wigs and perukes old and young kept their locks tightly shorn...

...I can assure you that there is nothing new under the sun in this fashion...

...I am afraid," mused Doctor Angelicus, "that my Cousin Ann will no longer welcome me at her Sunday night suppers and I shall have to forego the cold roast beef, the ham and Worcestershire sauce which made her table so refreshing after a week of restaurant dinners...

...We can trace it from the Egyptian sculptures, from the remnants of Greek and Roman portraiture, from the stone reliefs of the primitive Mexicans and Hondurans, down through the early middle-ages when men and women wore their tresses clipped at the collar band...

...The Napoleonic era brought these cropped heads into the open...

...we know that Saint Margaret cut her hair and dressed as a man...