I have no desire to talk sentimental nonsense about my school days having been my happiest. That sort of talk is usually twaddle. It was not as school that I loved the Convent, though as school it had its unrivalled attractions; it was as home. When the time came to go from it I suffered that sharp pang felt by most girls on leaving home for school. I remember how I, who affected a sublime scorn for the cry-baby, blubbered like one myself when I was faced with the immediate prospect of life in Philadelphia. How well I recall my despair—how vividly I see the foolish scene I made in the empty Refectory, shadowy in the dusk of the June evening, where I was rehearsing the valedictory of the Graduating Class which I had been chosen to recite, and where, after the first few lines I broke down to my shame, and sniffled and gurgled and sobbed in the lap of the beloved mistress who was doing her best to comfort me, and also to keep me from disgracing her, as I should have done by any such scene on the great day itself.
If the Convent stands for so much in my memory, it would be ungrateful to regret the years I spent in it. The sole reason would be my loss, not as a student, but as a Philadelphian, for this loss was the price I paid. But the older I grow, the better I realize that to the loss I owe an immeasurable gain. For as a child I never got so accustomed to Philadelphia as not to see it at all. The thing we know too well is often the thing we see least clearly, or we should not need the philosopher to remind us that that is best which nearest lieth. All through my childhood and early youth I saw Philadelphia chiefly from the outside, and so saw it with more awe and wonder and lasting delight than those Philadelphians who, in childhood and early youth, saw it only from the inside,—too near for it to come together into the picture that tells.
CHAPTER V: TRANSITIONAL
I
And so it was with a great fear in my heart that, in the course of time and after I had learned as little as it was decent for Philadelphia girls to learn in the days before Bryn Mawr, I left the Convent altogether for Philadelphia. I can smile now in recalling the old fear, but it was no smiling matter at seventeen: a weeping matter rather, and many were the tears I shed in secret over the prospect before me. My holidays had not revealed Philadelphia to me as a place of evil and many dangers. But as I was to live there, it represented the world,—the sinful world, worse, the unknown world, to battle with whose temptations my life and training at the Convent had been the preparation.
ST PETER'S, INTERIOR
It added to the danger that sin could wear so peaceful an aspect and temptation keep so comfortably out of sight. During an interval, longer than I cared to have it, for I did not "come out" at once as a Philadelphia girl should and at the Convent I had made few Philadelphia friends, my personal knowledge of Philadelphia did not go much deeper than its house fronts. For the most part they bore the closest family resemblance to those of Eleventh and Spruce, with the same suggestion of order and repose in their well-washed marble steps and neatly-drawn blinds. My Father had then moved to Third Street near Spruce, and there rented a red brick house, one-half, or one-third, the size of my Grandfather's, but very like it in every other way, to the roses in the tiny back-yard and to the daily family routine except that, with a courageous defiance of tradition I do not know how we came by, we dined at the new dinner hour of six and said our prayers in the privacy of our bedrooms. The Stock Exchange was only a minute away, and yet, at our end, Third Street had not lost its character as a respectable residential street. We had for neighbours old Miss Grelaud and the Bullitts and, round the corner in Fourth Street, the Wisters and Bories and Schaumbergs,—with what bated breath Philadelphia talked of the beauty and talents of Miss Emily Schaumberg, as she still was!—and many other Philadelphia families who had never lived anywhere else. Life went on as silently and placidly and regularly as at the Convent. I seemed merely to have exchanged one sort of monastic peace for another and the loudest sound I ever heard, the jingling of my old friend the horse-car, was not so loud as to disturb it.