"I hope I never shall tell another lie as long as I live," was the earnest rejoinder. "I wish somebody would talk to Alice, and explain to her how wicked it is."
[CHAPTER VII.]
SCHOOL LIES.
"FATHER," asked Alice Saunders, on the evening of her return from school for a short vacation, "when is Ellen coming home? It seems very odd to be without her."
"I cannot tell, my dear; probably not for a long time. Your aunt writes a very favorable account of her improvement. Among other things she says, 'I can trust her word most implicitly.'"
There was the slightest shade of contempt upon Alice's placid face, as she answered, "That is high praise from Aunt Collins."
Poor Alice!—Poor in all the heart's rich treasures, though beautiful in person, and fairy like in figure. In the fashionable boarding school where she had passed six months, she had been taught many things; but a strict adherence to truth was not among her accomplishments. She had acquired a more correct pronunciation of the French language; could dance with singular grace; could enter a room filled with company with the ease and polish of a lady of thirty; could write an acceptance or regret to a party with taste and elegance, and without any special violation of the rules of rhetoric,—but, alas! In all that pertained to the true, stern discipline of mind, or that regarded her moral culture, she was, if possible, more ignorant than ever.
Thrown into the society of half a hundred young misses, whose only aim seemed to be to outshine each other in dress or fashion; with teachers whose main ambition seemed to be to give, with a smattering of many kinds of knowledge, that superior ease and grace of manners which the papers ascribed to the pupils of Mrs. Lerow; every sentiment of virtue, or the stern principles of right, seemed to be blunted, while nothing really valuable was acquired.
One thing Alice, in common with most of her companions, had learned; and that was to sneer at, or hold in contempt, those persons who had a higher standard of morals than her own. The Bible, too, although her mother's favorite book, was considered old-fashioned and rigid, containing a code of laws which were to the present generation a kind of dead letter and of no manner of importance.
The Sabbath and the sanctuary she had learned to regard as golden opportunities to display the rich, fashionably made dress with which, at the suggestion of Mrs. Lerow, her father so abundantly supplied her.