She was now in her eighteenth year, a graduate of a somewhat noted “female” seminary, decidedly pretty, with a quick temper and a talent for teaching.
“It is a pity,” said the friendly visitor, “to tie her down to a school-room when she is just at the age when girls like to see company and go round with other young people. It isn’t as if they were obliged to put her to work.”
My mother replied discreetly, yet I detected a sympathetic tone in her speech.
The talk came into my mind many a time after the sessions of the school began, and I saw, through the window, young men and girls walking, riding, and driving past, the girls in their prettiest attire, the young men gallantly attentive, and all enjoying the gala-time of life that comes but once to any of us.
If the dark-eyed, serious, eighteen-year-old teacher felt the deprivation, she never murmured. I think her mother had taught her, with her first word and trial-step, to believe that her “father knew best.”
The school—the first I ever attended—was in the second story of an untenanted house on a side-street, rented from a villager. It was kept for ten months of the year. A vacation of a month in May, and another in September, divided two terms of five months each. I climbed the carpetless stairs to the big upper room six or eight times daily for five days a week, for forty weeks, and never without a quailing of nerve and sinking of heart as I strode past a locked door at the left of the entrance.
Inside of that door I had had my first view of Death.
I could not have been six years old, for it was summer, or early autumn, and I was walking my doll to sleep up and down the main alley of the garden, happy and bareheaded, and unconsciously “feeling my life in every limb,” when my mother called to me from the window to “come and be dressed.”
“I am going to take you and your sister to a funeral,” she continued, as a maid buttoned me up in a clean white frock, put on my Sunday shoes, and brushed the rebellious mop of hair that was never smooth for ten minutes in the day.