"I want her to go to a private school. She has such a difficult disposition, it will require delicate attention. The teachers haven't time to give her that patient attention in the public schools."
"My dear," Elinor's father had replied, shaking his head, "your husband's salary is not a private-school salary. It also has a difficult disposition, it also requires the most careful watching!"
"The cost will be more but she must go. Some extra expense will be unavoidable even for her clothing but I'll take that out of my clothes."
"You will do nothing of the kind! If Elinor has a difficult disposition, she gets it from Elinor's father; for he had one once, thank God! He had it until he went into the bank. But a bank takes every kind of disposition out of you, good or bad. After you've been in a bank so many years, you haven't any more disposition. Only the president of a bank enjoys the right to have a disposition. All the rest of us are mere habits—certain habits on uncertain salaries. Let Elinor go to her select school and I'll go a little more ragged. The outside world thinks it a bank joke when they look through the windows and see bank clerks at work in ragged coats: instead they know better. Let Elinor go and let the damages fall on her father. He will be glad to take the extra cost off his own back as a tribute to his unbanked boyhood. I hope you noticed my pun—my dooble intender."
Thus Elinor was sent to the most select private school of the city. Webster weighed the matter on the scales of boyish justice. If you had a bad disposition, you were rewarded by being better dressed and being sent to the best school; if you had a good disposition, you dressed plainly and went to the public school. What ought he to do about his own disposition? Why not turn it into a bad one? It was among Webster's bewilderments that he was so poorly off as not to be able to muster a troublesome enough disposition to be sent to one of the city's select private schools for boys: he should very much have liked to go!
"I go to a private school because I am nice," Elinor had boasted to him one morning. She was sitting on the front steps as he came out on his way to school, and she looked very dainty and very charming—a dark, wiry, fiery, restless little creature, and at the moment a bit of brilliant decoration. "And I get nice marks," she added pointedly.
He paused to make a quietly contemptuous reply.
"Of course you get nice marks: that's what private schools are for—to give everybody nice marks. If you went to the public school, you'd get what you deserved."
"Then you seem to deserve very little," said Elinor, smoothing a lock of her black hair over one ear.
His rage burst out at her deadly thrust: