THE RED BONNET

The Drawer has no wish to make Lent easier for anybody, or rather to diminish the benefit of the penitential season.  But in this period of human anxiety and repentance it must be said that not enough account is made of the moral responsibility of Things.  The doctrine is sound; the only difficulty is in applying it.  It can, however, be illustrated by a little story, which is here confided to the reader in the same trust in which it was received.  There was once a lady, sober in mind and sedate in manner, whose plain dress exactly represented her desire to be inconspicuous, to do good, to improve every day of her life in actions that should benefit her kind.  She was a serious person, inclined to improving conversation, to the reading of bound books that cost at least a dollar and a half (fifteen cents of which she gladly contributed to the author), and she had a distaste for the gay society which was mainly a flutter of ribbons and talk and pretty faces; and when she meditated, as she did in her spare moments, her heart was sore over the frivolity of life and the emptiness of fashion.  She longed to make the world better, and without any priggishness she set it an example of simplicity and sobriety, of cheerful acquiescence in plainness and inconspicuousness.

One day—­it was in the autumn—­this lady had occasion to buy a new hat.  From a great number offered to her she selected a red one with a dull red plume.  It did not agree with the rest of her apparel; it did not fit her apparent character.  What impulse led to this selection she could not explain.  She was not tired of being good, but something in the jauntiness of the hat and the color pleased her.  If it were a temptation, she did not intend to yield to it, but she thought she would take the hat home and try it.  Perhaps her nature felt the need of a little warmth.  The hat pleased her still more when she got it home and put it on and surveyed herself in the mirror.  Indeed, there was a new expression in her face that corresponded to the hat.  She put it off and looked at it.  There was something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it.  In short, she kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of its incongruity to herself or to her dress, but of the incongruity of the rest of her apparel to the hat, which seemed to have a sort of intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and conforming things to itself.  By degrees one article after another in the lady’s wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to the demanding spirit of the hat.  In a little while this plain lady was not plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the desire to be in the height of the fashion.  It came to this, that she had a tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.  Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her presence.