Penrod | Page 8

insuperable delicacies of narration.
Penrod's father was an old-fashioned man: the twentieth century had
failed to shake his faith in red flannel for cold weather; and it was while
Mrs. Schofield was putting away her husband's winter underwear that
she perceived how hopelessly one of the elder specimens had dwindled;
and simultaneously she received the inspiration which resulted in a pair
of trunks for the Child Sir Lancelot, and added an earnest bit of colour,
as well as a genuine touch of the Middle Ages, to his costume.
Reversed, fore to aft, with the greater part of the legs cut off, and strips
of silver braid covering the seams, this garment, she felt, was not
traceable to its original source.
When it had been placed upon Penrod, the stockings were attached to it
by a system of safety-pins, not very perceptible at a distance. Next,
after being severely warned against stooping, Penrod got his feet into
the slippers he wore to dancing-school--"patent-leather pumps" now
decorated with large pink rosettes.
"If I can't stoop," he began, smolderingly, "I'd like to know how'm I
goin' to kneel in the pag----"
"You must MANAGE!" This, uttered through pins, was evidently
thought to be sufficient.

They fastened some ruching about his slender neck, pinned ribbons at
random all over him, and then Margaret thickly powdered his hair.
"Oh, yes, that's all right," she said, replying to a question put by her
mother. "They always powdered their hair in Colonial times."
"It doesn't seem right to me--exactly," objected Mrs. Schofield, gently.
"Sir Lancelot must have been ever so long before Colonial times."
"That doesn't matter," Margaret reassured her. "Nobody'll know the
difference--Mrs. Lora Rewbush least of all. I don't think she knows a
thing about it, though, of course, she does write splendidly and the
words of the pageant are just beautiful.
Stand still, Penrod!" (The author of "Harold Ramorez" had moved
convulsively.) "Besides, powdered hair's always becoming. Look at
him. You'd hardly know it was Penrod!"
The pride and admiration with which she pronounced this undeniable
truth might have been thought tactless, but Penrod, not analytical,
found his spirits somewhat elevated. No mirror was in his range of
vision and, though he had submitted to cursory measurements of his
person a week earlier, he had no previous acquaintance with the
costume. He began to form a not unpleasing mental picture of his
appearance, something somewhere between the portraits of George
Washington and a vivid memory of Miss Julia Marlowe at a matinee of
"Twelfth Night."
He was additionally cheered by a sword which had been borrowed from
a neighbor, who was a Knight of Pythias. Finally there was a mantle, an
old golf cape of Margaret's. Fluffy polka-dots of white cotton had been
sewed to it generously; also it was ornamented with a large cross of red
flannel, suggested by the picture of a Crusader in a newspaper
advertisement. The mantle was fastened to Penrod's shoulder (that is, to
the shoulder of Mrs. Schofield's ex-bodice) by means of large safety-
pins, and arranged to hang down behind him, touching his heels, but
obscuring nowise the glory of his facade. Then, at last, he was allowed
to step before a mirror.
It was a full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened. It might
have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations had not
been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, the revolt
was volcanic.
Victor Hugo's account of the fight with the devil-fish, in "Toilers of the

Sea," encourages a belief that, had Hugo lived and increased in power,
he might have been equal to a proper recital of the half hour which
followed Penrod's first sight of himself as the Child Sir Lancelot. But
Mr. Wilson himself, dastard but eloquent foe of Harold Ramorez, could
not have expressed, with all the vile dashes at his command, the
sentiments which animated Penrod's bosom when the instantaneous and
unalterable conviction descended upon him that he was intended by his
loved ones to make a public spectacle of himself in his sister's
stockings and part of an old dress of his mother's.
To him these familiar things were not disguised at all; there seemed no
possibility that the whole world would not know them at a glance. The
stockings were worse than the bodice. He had been assured that these
could not be recognized, but, seeing them in the mirror, he was sure
that no human eye could fail at first glance to detect the difference
between himself and the former purposes of these stockings. Fold,
wrinkle, and void shrieked their history with a hundred tongues,
invoking earthquake, eclipse, and blue ruin. The frantic youth's final
submission was obtained only after a painful telephonic conversation
between himself and his father, the latter having been