“There's nothing wrong with 'quaint,' my dear,” said Miss Ailie; “it moves in the most exclusive circles; if I noticed it particularly, it is because it is the indication of a certain state of mind, and tells me where you stand in your education more clearly than your first quarterly report. I came home from school with 'quaint' myself; it not only seemed to save a lot of trouble by being a word which could be applied to anything not otherwise describable, but I cherished it because its use conferred on me a kind of inward glow of satisfaction like—like—like Aunt Bell's homemade ginger cordial. 'Quaint,' Bud, is the shibboleth of boarding-school culture; when you can use the word in the proper place, with a sense of superiority to the thing so designated, you are practically a young lady and the polish is taking on.”
“They all say it in our school,” explained Bud, apologetically; “at least all except The Macintosh—I couldn't think of her saying it, somehow.
“Who's The Macintosh?” asked Ailie.
“Why! was there no Macintosh in your time?” exclaimed Bud. “I thought she went away back to the—to the Roman period. She's the funniest old lady in the land, and comes twice a week to teach us dancing and deportment. She's taught them to mostly all the nobility and gentry of Scotland; she taught Lady Anne and all her brothers when they were in St. Andrew's.”
“I never heard of her,” said Ailie; “she must be—be—be decidedly quaint.”
“She's so quaint you'd think she'd be kept in a corner cupboard with a bag of camphor at the back to scare the moths away. She's a little wee mite, not any bigger than me—than I—and they say she's seventy years old; but sometimes she doesn't look a day more than forty-five, if it weren't for her cap and her two front teeth missing. She's got the loveliest fluffy, silver hair—pure white, like Mrs. Molyneux's Aunt Tabitha's Persian cat—cheeks like an apple, hands as young as yours, and when she walks across a room she glides like this, so you'd think she was a cutter yacht—”
Bud sailed across the parlor to represent the movement of The Macintosh with an action that made her aunties laugh, and the dog gave one short yelp of disapproval.
“That was the way that Grandma Buntain walked—it used to be considered most genteel,” said Bell. “They trained girls up to it with a back-board and a book on the top of the head; but it was out before my time; we just walked any way in Barbara Mushet's seminary, where the main things were tambouring and the catechism.”
“Miss Macintosh is a real lady,” Bud went on. “She's got genuine old ancestors. They owned a Highland place called Kaims, and the lawyers have almost lawyered it a' awa', she says, so now she's simply got to help make a living teaching dancing and deportment. I declare I don't know what deportment is no more than the child unborn, unless it's shutting the door behind you, walking into a room as if your head and your legs were your own, keeping your shoulders back, and being polite and kind to everybody, and I thought folks 'd do all that without attending classes, unless they were looney. Miss Macintosh says they are the sine qua non and principal branches for a well-bred young lady in these low days of clingy frocks and socialism; but the principal she just smiles and gives us another big block of English history. Miss Macintosh doesn't let on, but I know she simply can't stand English history, for she tells us, spells between quadrilles, that there hasn't been any history anywhere since the Union of the Parliaments, except the Rebellion of 1745. But she doesn't call it a rebellion. She calls it 'yon affair.' She's Scotch! I tell you, Auntie Bell, you'd love to meet her! I sit, and sit, and look at her like—like a cat. She wears spectacles, just a little clouded, only she doesn't call them spectacles; she says they are preserves, and that her eyes are as good as anybody's. They're bright enough, I tell you, for over seventy.”
“Indeed, I would like to see the creature!” exclaimed Miss Bell. “She must be an original! I'm sometimes just a trifle tired of the same old folk about me here—I know them all so well, and all they're like to do or say, that there's nothing new or startling to be expected from them.”