These remarks reveal on his part a special philosophy that will become clearer as we get to know better Miss Annette Thompson and Herndon Hall. The officers of the trust company felt that in sending their ward to this fashionable girls' school, they were doing their duty by her not only safely but handsomely, and thenceforth dismissed her from their thoughts, except when a subordinate brought them at regular intervals a voucher to sign before issuing a check on behalf of Adelle....
"Terribly crude little piece," the president of the trust company said of Adelle, thinking of his own vivacious daughters, who at her age had been complete little women of the world, and of all the other pretty, confident, voluble girls he met in his social life. "She has seen nothing of life," he said in extenuation, by which he meant naturally that Adelle Clark had never known how "nice people live," had never been to dancing-school or parties, or country clubs or smart dressmakers, and all the rest of what to him constituted a "suitable education" for a young girl who was to inherit money.
Meanwhile the "crude little piece" returned to her old home, somewhat shaken in mind by what had happened to her. It never entered her little head to argue with the august officers of the trust company, who stood to her as the sacred symbol of Authority. She must buy a trunk, pack it, and be at the Eclair Hotel in B—— by noon on the following Friday. Those were her orders. She looked wonderingly at the two hundred dollar check which Mr. Gardiner had given her for the expense of making herself ready. She had never before seen two hundred dollars. She knew only abstractly by the way of her arithmetic that such vast sums of money existed. And now she was expected to spend this fortune in the space of three days upon herself. She folded up the slip of paper and tucked it carefully into her purse. When she presented it at one of the shops in the Square in payment for the cheap trunk she had selected, she started a local sensation. By the time the check had traveled from the clerk to the proprietor and thence to the River National Bank, which did not take long, it was known in that busy neighborhood that Clark's Field had made good at last! Here was ready money from it as evidence. Adelle Clark was in fact the heiress that her mother Addie had been in fancy.
The manager of the livery-stable may have had his regrets for the light manner in which he had treated old Pike's suggestion. He drove the girl himself into B—— on Friday with her new trunk strapped behind the closed carriage and touched his high hat when she dismounted before the flunky-guarded doors of the hotel. Adelle did not notice the hat business: she gave her old friend and best "roomer" her hand as she said good-bye, then slowly mounted the stone steps of the hotel. And that was the last that Church Street saw of the Clarks.
The liveryman, slowly retracing his way across the bridge to Alton, mused upon the picture that the little girl presented in her blue school suit, going up the steps of the Eclair Hotel. It was all like a stage story, he felt, and he thought long about the Clarks, whom he had known for two generations and about human fate generally. He summed up his reflections in one enigmatic exclamation,—"That blamed old pasture!"
Adelle was an "heiress." Already she had been whisked away from Church Street to her new life. And all because of "that blamed old pasture"—otherwise Clark's Field.
XI
The civilized inhabitants of our twentieth-century world are acquainted with many more kinds of torture than the ingenious managers of the Inquisition ever dreamed of in their most lurid nightmares. And of all these peculiarly modern forms of torture, perhaps the fashionable girls' school such as Herndon Hall takes first rank. A boys' school of the same order—conducted under the patronage of some holy saint's name—is often pretty bad, but it cannot rival the girls' school because women are more skillful in applying social torture and have a thousand ways of doing it to a man's or boy's one. Even among the softest and snobbiest of boys and masters there will always remain a residuum of male self-respect. If the newcomer, no matter how wrongly classed, proves that he has physical courage, or an aptitude for sports, or even a sunny, common-sense disposition, he will quickly escape from his probationary period of torture and become tolerated; while if a girl appears among her future schoolmates with an ill-made, unfashionable frock, or has manners that betray less sophistication than is to be expected, she may never survive the torture that begins on the instant and follows her relentlessly, in the schoolroom and out, until she either adapts herself to her environment, becoming in turn a torturer, or is removed to a more congenial environment.