And then, the unimaginable grace of those costumes! Sometimes a woman's whole dress was but a scarf wound about her person and her head, sometimes a man's was but a turban and a careless rag or two--in both cases generous areas of polished dark skin showing--but always the arrangement compelled the homage of the eye and made the heart sing for gladness.
I can see it to this day, that radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and restraint, and-- Just then, into this dream of fairyland and paradise a grating dissonance was injected.
Out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, sixteen prim and pious little Christian black girls, Europeanly clothed--dressed, to the last detail, as they would have been dressed on a summer Sunday in an English or American village.

Those clothes--oh, they were unspeakably ugly! Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud.

I looked at my womenfolk's clothes--just full-grown duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures -- and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them.

Then I looked at my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself.
However, we must put up with our clothes as they are--they have their reason for existing.

They are on us to expose us--to advertise what we wear them to conceal.