The Homely Heroine
by
Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with her finger. I had been standing at Kate O’Malley’s counter, pretending to admire her new basket-weave suitings, but in reality reveling in her droll account of how, in the train coming up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge Porterfield had worn the negro porter’s coat over her chilly shoulders in mistake for her husband’s. Kate O’Malley can tell a funny story in a way to make the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove.
“I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours,” said Millie, sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, “and I liked it, all but the heroine. She had an `adorable throat’ and hair that `waved away from her white brow,’ and eyes that `now were blue and now gray.’ Say, why don’t you write a story about an ugly girl?”
“My land!” protested I. “It’s bad enough trying to make them accept my stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty, but she came back eleven times before the editor of Blakely’s succumbed to her charms.”
Millie’s fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray of combs and imitation jet barrettes. Millie’s fingers were not intended for that task. They are slender, tapering fingers, pink-tipped and sensitive.
“I should think,” mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a bit of soft cloth, “that they’d welcome a homely one with relief. These goddesses are so cloying.”
Millie Whitcomb’s black hair is touched with soft mists of gray, and she wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged with lavender. There is a Colonial air about her that has nothing to do with celluloid combs and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the tones of mahogany and old brass, and Millie in the midst of it, gray-gowned, a soft white fichu crossed upon her breast.
In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young persons that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at Bascom’s are institutions. They know us all by our first names, and our lives are as an open book to them. Kate O’Malley, who has been at Bascom’s for so many years that she is rumored to have stock in the company, may be said to govern the fashions of our town. She is wont to say, when we express a fancy for gray as the color of our new spring suit:
“Oh, now, Nellie, don’t get gray again. You had it year before last, and don’t you think it was just the least leetle bit trying? Let me show you that green that came in yesterday. I said the minute I clapped my eyes on it that it was just the color for you, with your brown hair and all.”
And we end by deciding on the green.
The girls at Bascom’s are not gossips–they are too busy for that–but they may be said to be delightfully well informed. How could they be otherwise when we go to Bascom’s for our wedding dresses and party favors and baby flannels? There is news at Bascom’s that our daily paper never hears of, and wouldn’t dare print if it did.
So when Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, expressed her hunger for a homely heroine, I did not resent the suggestion. On the contrary, it sent me home in thoughtful mood, for Millie Whitcomb has acquired a knowledge of human nature in the dispensing of her fancy goods and notions. It set me casting about for a really homely heroine.
There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On Page 237 she puts on a black lace dress and red roses, and the combination brings out unexpected tawny lights in her hair, and olive tints in her cheeks, and there she is, the same old beautiful heroine. Even in the “Duchess” books one finds the simple Irish girl, on donning a green corduroy gown cut square at the neck, transformed into a wild-rose beauty, at sight of whom a ball-room is hushed into admiring awe. There’s the case of jane Eyre, too. She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like, but there are covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure and clear skin, and we have a sneaking notion that she wasn’t such a fright after all.