Miss Ryder did not mention this interesting fact to the fond parents from Idaho and Texas who contemplated placing their daughters in the school, in order that they might acquire a New York lacquer, and make acquaintances among the social elect. In fact, Miss Ryder always dangled before the eyes of these ambitious parents a group of names suggesting a list of guests for the most exclusive of Newport functions, and dwelt eloquently upon the privilege of breathing the air which furnished oxygen to members of these exalted families. Nine times out of ten, mere repetition of the sacred names hypnotised the prospective patrons, and they gladly offered up their daughters upon the altar of social advancement.
An explanation of the class-system would have marred the optimistic hopes of these fond parents, and the Misses Ryder were too altruistic to disturb the happiness of fellow mortals. Moreover, it was a comparatively simple thing to separate day-scholars from boarders without appearing to make a point of it.
In the handling of such delicate matters, the Misses Ryder displayed a tact and a finesse which would have made them ornaments to any diplomatic corps; and, fortunately, the number of the young ladies who were, of necessity, to be kept in cotton wool was small. The great bulk of the school's attendance was more or less genially democratic.
School keeping in an aristocratic section of New York is an expensive matter. It must be done upon a large and daring scale. The Misses Ryder occupied two brownstone houses. The rents were enormous. The houses were handsomely furnished. Teachers of ability were a necessity, and such teachers were expensive. A capable housekeeper and efficient servants were required to make domestic affairs run smoothly. In consideration of all this, it was imperative that the Misses Ryder should gather in, each year, enough boarders to exhaust the room capacity of the two big houses, and that these boarders should be able and willing to pay high prices. In order to insure this condition of things, one of the two principals always made summer pilgrimages to remote places, where wealthy families possessed of daughters hungering for New York advantages might reasonably be supposed to exist; and it was in the course of one of these promoting tours that Miss Lucilla Ryder came to Lanleyville—drawn there by knowledge of certain large milling interests in the place.
It was—with apologies to Tennyson—"the miller's daughter" who was "dear, so dear," to Miss Lucilla, but an unkind fate had decreed that the miller's daughter should show a pernicious desire for college education, and that the miller himself should be as wax in his daughter's hands. Miss Lucilla did not find pupils in Lanleyville, but she found Belinda. That alone should have repaid her for the trip.
The meeting was accidental, being brought about through the aforesaid miller's daughter, who had been, for a High-School period, one of Belinda's adoring slaves.
The Misses Ryder needed a teacher of English; Belinda dreamed of New York. To make a long story short, Belinda was engaged to teach to the Ryder pupils such sections and fragments of the English branches as might be introduced into their heads without resort to surgery. The salary offered was meagre, but the work would be in New York; so the contract was made, and Belinda was inclined to look upon Miss Lucilla as angel of light. Miss Lucilla's opinion of the arrangement was summed up briefly in her next letter to Miss Emmeline.
"I have secured a teacher of English," she wrote. "The young person is much too pretty and girlish, but she is willing to accept a very small salary and is unmistakably a gentlewoman. Her attractions will give her an influence which we may be able to utilize for the benefit of the school."
Two months later Belinda sat upon her trunk in a New York hall bedroom and considered.
The room was the smallest in the Misses Ryder's Select School for Young Ladies, and before the introduction of the trunk it had been necessary to evict the one chair which had been a part of the room's furnishing. The bed was turned up against the wall, where it masqueraded, behind denim curtains, as a bookcase. When the bed came down there was no standing room outside of it, and, as Belinda discovered later, getting into that bed without casualties was a feat calling for fine strategy. A chiffonier retired as coyly as possible into the embrace of a recessed doorway; a washstand of Lilliputian dimensions occupied an infinitesimal fraction of a corner.