so we all know what it’s like when you get the itch to re-read a scene you vividly recall, but you can’t remember the title or author
I am 99% sure I know the author, in this case. it’s Grace Livingston Hill, who wrote a huge series of Christian romance novels that were nauseatingly wholesome and PG. the worst thing that ever happened in these books was the villain trapping a heroine somewhere and assaulting her face with “hot kisses.” I read a great number of them in junior high, at my unaccredited private Baptist school. it’s not like I had a lot of selection when they were censoring Gulliver’s Travels.
but there’s one book in particular I keep wanting to look up again, and even though I’ve fallen into hours-long internet searches, I’ve had no luck whatsoever.
this is despite my very specific google search of “grace livingstone hill books orange dragon pajamas”
let me tell you about the orange dragon pajamas.
as I recall in this book, there is a wholesome Christian family. probably at least three children. a younger son who, to his peril, leaves home for some purpose and for some period of time. and he returns to them married – married to a loose woman. a woman without the benefit of their decent Christian morals and family values.
it is this new daughter-in-law who introduces, to this poor unsuspecting wholesome Christian family, a set of orange dragon pajamas.
not that she gives them as a gift or suggests that anyone else wear them. no, she is the one who dons them one night, before them all. (maybe I am misremembering – maybe they aren’t actually pajamas, though they were certainly described as resembling such. but they involved pants, of course, because that furthered the horror. the good women in Grace Livingston Hill’s books [which were usually set in the first half of the 20th century, as that’s when she lived] do not wear pants. and I remember them being described as silk, or something like, and of a lurid color, and absolutely outrageous.
worst of all, the pattern featured dragons. and dragons, there can be no doubt, are in every case a representation and celebration of Satan. (that worldview still holds in the fundamentalist circles I grew up in.)
what did this scandalous new daughter-in-law do, donned in dreadful devil’s apparel?
yes. she put on a dance for her new in-laws in the living room of their tastefully and wholesomely decorated Christian home. she danced as though she were in a nightclub, with abandon, without the least self-consciousness, dancing as none of them have ever seen before, as they stare in white-lipped horror, and it only came to an end when
her new husband, overcome by the deepest shame
turns off the light switch.
now I hope you understand why I am dying to re-read this book. and I am so frustrated that the internet is denying me this treat.
(I do remember the conclusion: she takes off, of course, leaving behind only a careless note informing the son that their marriage was a farce because the minister who married them was never licensed after all, ta-ta for now! so he is Saved. and so is she.)
