Chapter XII
My Prize Beet
HAD been seven years old for so long that I alluded to myself habitually as "almost eight." We had our governess now, Miss Davidson, a handsome, amiable, and somewhat sentimental Bostonian recommended by a Richmond friend of my father. Four other girls studied with us. Two of them, Paulina and Sarah Hobson, were our second cousins. They stayed at our house from Monday morning until Friday evening, going home for Sunday, unless the weather were bad. Madeline and Rosa Pemberton were day scholars, the Pemberton plantation adjoining ours.
I was the youngest of the six, and while I fancy that I was rather a favorite with Miss Davidson, I endured much from the girls on account of my inferiority in age, as well as because of my "old-fashioned, conceited ways." That was one reason I spoke of being almost eight. I was trying to grow up to what they complained of as "getting above" myself.
The frank brutality of school children of both sexes, as contrasted with the unselfish forbearance (or the show of it) and the suave courtesy of well-bred men and women, is an instructive study in the evolution of ethics. The youngest boy or girl in class or college is the weakest wolf in the pack, the under dog in the fight. I had all of a little girl's natural desire for new playfellows and the dreamer's passion for more material for castle-building. The prospect of "the school" was ravishing. I constructed scenes and rehearsed conversations, with the cast of coming actors, until the quartette must have been super-or sub-human, had they come up to one tithe of my requirements.
In plain and very homely fact, they were four commonplace, provincial girls of average natural intelligence, in age varying from twelve to fourteen. They studied because they would be called upon to recite, and recited fairly well for fear of reproof and bad marks should they be derelict. Out of school, books and bookish thoughts were cast to the four winds of heaven. Their talk was cheery chatter, as brainless as the rattle of grasshoppers in the summer grass.
Mary 'Liza towered above them in scholastic attainments, although the junior of the youngest of them, keeping at the head of every class with unostentatious ease. I am afraid that I may have done my orphaned cousin seeming injustice in former chapters of this autobiography. Her temper was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would have led the casual acquaintance to suppose. She was ultra-conscientious, and naturally so exemplary that her good behavior was a snare. She could not sympathize with my temptations to naughtiness and many falls from good-girlhood. I mention this to introduce what was a surprise to me at the time. She never joined in the persecutions of me that were the labor and the pastime of the other girls. It would have been asking too much to expect her to champion me openly. I was affectionately grateful to her for holding herself aloof when baiting me was the amusement of the hour.