For Mrs. Preemby was not the woman to like a daughter educated above her parentage and station. She came to lament her weakness in not bringing Christina Alberta into the laundry as she herself had been brought in at the age of fourteen. Then she would have learnt the business from the ground up, and have qualified herself to help and at last succeed her mother, even as Mrs. Preemby had helped and succeeded Mrs. Hossett. But the school with its tennis and music and French and so forth had turned the girl against this clean and cleansing life. She was rising seventeen now, and the sooner she abandoned these things which lead straight to school-teaching, spinsterhood, Italian holidays, “art” clothes and stuck-up incapacity, the better for her and every one.
She made a campaign against Christina Alberta’s habit of sitting about in unladylike attitudes and reading; and when Mr. Preemby took the unusual and daring course of saying that it was a bit hard on the girl, and that he didn’t see any harm in a book or so now and then, Mrs. Preemby took him up to Christina Alberta’s own little room to see what came of it, and more particularly to see the sort of pictures she’d stuck up there. Even when he was confronted with a large photographic reproduction of Michael Angelo’s creation of Adam as the master had painted that event on the roof of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he still made a feeble show of resistance, and said that it was “Art.”
“You’d stand anything she did, I believe,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Look at it. Art! Look at these books! Darwin’s Origin of Species! That’s a nice book for a girl to be prying into.”
“Very likely she doesn’t see the harm of it,” said Mr. Preemby.
“Her!” said Mrs. Preemby compactly. “And look at this!”
“This” was Howe’s Atlas of Biology. She opened it to display its large pages crowded with pictures of the detailed dissection of a frog.
“Reely, my dear!” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s one of her schoolbooks. There reely isn’t nothing what I should call improper in that. It’s Science. And, after all, it’s only a frog.”
“Pretty things they teach at school nowadays. What with your Art and your Science. Doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Why, when I was a girl if I’d asked Ma what was inside any animal, she’d have slapped me and slapped me hard. And rightly. There’s things rightly hid from us—and hid they ought to be. God shows us as much as is good for us. More. No need to open animals. And here—here’s a book in French!”
“H’m,” said Mr. Preemby, yielding a little. He took up the lemon-yellow volume and turned it over in his hand.
“All this reading!” said Mrs. Preemby and indicated three shelves of books.