The non-sectarian girls’ schools of good standing looked askance at would-be entrants whose parentage was as socially questionable, not to say bizarre, as that represented by Ravenal mère and père. The daughter of a professional gambler and an ex-show-boat actress would have received short shrift at the hands of the head mistress of Miss Dignam’s School for Girls at Somethingorother-on-the-Hudson. The convent school, then, opened its gloomy portals to as motley a collection of jeunes filles as could be imagined under one roof. In the prim dim corridors and cubicles of St. Agatha’s on Wabash Avenue, south, you might see a score of girlish pupils who, in spite of the demure face, the sleek braids, the severe uniform, the modest manner, the prunes-and-prism expression, still resembled in a startling degree this or that vivacious lady whose name was associated with the notorious Everleigh Club, or with the music halls and museums thriving along Clark Street or Madison or Dearborn. Visiting day at St. Agatha’s saw an impressive line of smart broughams outside the great solemn brick building; and the ladies who emerged therefrom, while invariably dressed in garments of sombre colour and restrained cut, still produced the effect of being attired in what is known as fast black. They gave forth a heady musky scent. And the mould of their features, even when transformed by the expression that crept over them as they gazed upon those girlish faces so markedly resembling their own, had a look as though the potter had used a heavy thumb.
The convent had been Magnolia’s idea. Ravenal had laughed when she broached the subject to him. “She’ll be well fed and housed and generally cared for there,” he agreed. “And she’ll learn French and embroidery and deportment and maybe some arithmetic, if she’s lucky. But every t—uh—every shady lady on Clark Street sends her daughter there.”
“She’s got to go somewhere, Gay. This pillar-to-post life we’re leading is terrible for a child.”
“What about your own life when you were a child? I suppose you led a prissy existence.”
“It was routine compared to Kim’s. When I went to bed in my little room on the Cotton Blossom I at least woke up in it next morning. Kim goes to sleep on north Clark and wakes up on Michigan Avenue. She never sees a child her own age. She knows more bell boys and chambermaids and waiters than a travelling man. She thinks a dollar bill is something to buy candy with and that when a stocking has a hole in it you throw it away. She can’t do the simplest problem in arithmetic, and yesterday I found her leaning over the second-floor rotunda rail spitting on the heads of people in the——”
“Did she hit anybody?”
“It isn’t funny, Gay.”
“It is, too. I’ve always wanted to do it.”
“Well, so have I—but, anyway, it won’t be funny five years from now.”
St. Agatha’s occupied half of one of Chicago’s huge square blocks. Its great flight of front steps was flush with the street, but at the back was a garden discreetly protected by a thick brick wall fully ten feet high and belligerently spiked. St. Agatha herself and a whole host of attendant cherubim looked critically down upon Magnolia and Kim as they ascended the long broad flight of steps that led to the elaborately (and lumpily) carved front door. Of the two Magnolia was the more terrified. The windows glittered so sharply. The stairs were so clean. The bell, as they rang it, seemed to echo so hollowly through endless unseen halls and halls and halls. The hand that opened the door had been preceded by no sound of human footsteps. The door had loomed before them seemingly as immovable as the building itself. There was the effect of black magic in its sudden and noiseless opening. The great entrance hall waited still and dim. The black-robed figure before them was vaguely surmounted by a round white face that had the look of being no face at all but a flat circular surface on which features had been clumsily daubed.