“I’m afraid so; but now let us talk about something else: I’ve some news for you, but do not know how you will like it; sit still while I tell it to you,” and he began to unfold his plan regarding the school.
CHAPTER II
“A TOUCH CAN MAKE OR A TOUCH CAN MAR”
The school was chosen and Toinette placed therein. What momentous results often follow a simple act. When Clayton Reeve placed his little girl with the Misses Carter, intending to leave her there a few months, and seek the change of scene so essential to his health, he did not realize that her whole future would be more or less influenced by the period she was destined to spend there. No brighter, sunnier, happier disposition could have been met with than Toinette’s when she entered the school; none more restless, distrustful and dissatisfied than her’s when she left it, nearly six years later.
If we are held accountable for sins of omission, as well as sins of commission, certainly the Misses Carter had a long account to meet.
Like many others who had chosen that vocation, they were utterly incapable of filling it either to their own credit or the advantage of those they taught. While perfectly capable of imparting the knowledge they had obtained from books, and of making any number of rules to be followed as those of the “Medes and Persians,” they did not, in the very remotest degree, possess the insight into character, the sympathy with their pupils so essential in true teachers.
It is not alone to learn that which is contained between the covers of a book that our girls are sent to school or college, but also to gather in the thousand and one things untaught by either books or words. These must be absorbed as the flowers absorb the sunshine and dew, growing lovelier, sweeter and more attractive each day and never suspecting it.
And so the shaping of Toinette’s character, so beautifully begun by the wise, gentle mother, passed into other and less sensitive hands. It was like a delicate bit of pottery, the pride of the potter’s heart, upon which he had spent uncountable hours, and was fashioning so skilfully, almost fearing to touch it lest he mar instead of add to its beauty; dreading to let others approach lest, lacking his own nice conceptions, they bring about a result he had so earnestly sought to avoid, and the vase lose its perfect symmetry. But, alas! called from his work never to return, it is completed by less skilful hands, a less delicate conception, and, while the result is pleasing, the perfect harmony of proportion is wanting, and those who see it feel conscious of its incompleteness, yet scarcely know why.