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have thought his daughter the loveliest thing in the world anyway. And so I was spoiled and petted and adored.
Dad's salary was small, and our little brown-shingled house on Pelham Street was a far cry from a fairy castle, but it was that for me, for in it every spoken wish came true. There was a beautiful doll's house in one room {mother had needed a new coat that winter) and a slide and see-saw in the basement, (Dad had a hard time paying for the coal that year), and everything else I ever asked for. Most of the girls I knew, even the ones whose parents were much better off than mine, wore hand-me-down or made-over clothes sometimes, took turns with toys, had household chores they were expected to do, learned to give and take, to share, to assume responsibility. But not I.
I didn't participate in the roughhouse
games of the neighborhood children, either. Partly because I loved my pretty clothes too much to spoil them, and partly because Mother loved to have me with her all the time. Mother was a genius with her needle; she taught me to sew early, and imbued me with an eye for line and color, a rich pleasure in the feel of fabrics. While the other children played outside, I sat with Mother, cutting and putting tiny, careful stitches into clothes for my dolls, while Mother made far too many, far too lavish clothes for me.
That was the fairyland in which I grew up — and out of which I was so frighteningly shaken during my last year of high school, when Dad died, and Mother followed him a few weeks later. There I was, stunned and alone, and unequipped to wrest a living from the world and make myself a place in it.
I don't know what I would have doner
if Mrs. Andrews, from next door, in answer to my terrified, "What shall I do?" hadn't said, tartly, "You certainly can sew, Shelley. You get yourself right down to Harpers' Store and see if they don't need somebody in alterations. Goodness, child, you can't just sit!"
It's really too bad that they did need an alteration hand at Harpers' — I know that now. It would have been better if that first job had been refused me, and a second and a third, for then I might have learned, bitterly and frighteningly, what it was like to have someone say no to me, what it was like to have to struggle for what I wanted. It would have been better if, a year later, Mrs. Sheldon, who was the owner of a very exclusivetoy shop on the other side of the city, hadn't come into Harpers' and bought a dress; if I hadn't been called to alter it for her.
We got to talking, she and I, about
Shelley closed herself away in a dream world, waiting for a prince to beckon. But in place of the prince
there came a man, ruthlessly shattering her make-believe