She folded up her napkin at dinner in the thrifty manner of the Church Street house. She ate her soup from the point of her spoon, and the wrong spoon, and she wore her one dress from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed. If it had not been for the solid social position of President West and the prestige of the trust company, whose ward she was, it is probable that Adelle would have been sent packing by the end of the second day. As it was, the head mistress said to Miss Stevens, with a sigh of commendable Christian resignation,—"We must do our best for the poor little thing—send her in to me after dinner."
When Adelle entered the private sitting-room of the head mistress, she expected to be given directions about her classes. Not at all. Miss Thomson, who still seemed to be suffering from the indisposition that Adelle found frequently attacked her, looked her over coldly as she sipped her coffee and remarked that she "must have something fit to wear at once." She put the little girl through a careful examination as to the contents of her trunk, with the result that in a few days Adelle's wardrobe was marvelously increased with a supply of suitable frocks for all occasions, slippers, lingerie, and hats, and the bill was sent to the trust company, which honored it promptly without question, not knowing exactly what a girl ought to cost. Having equipped her pupil "decently," Miss Thompson observed "that she didn't have an idea how to wear her clothes," but she trusted to the spirit of the school to correct that deficiency. Next she sent Adelle to the dentist and had her teeth straightened,—a painful operation that dragged through several years at great cost of time and money, and resulted finally in a set of regular teeth that looked much like false ones. Having provided for her outside, the teachers turned their attention to her manners and "form," and here lay Adelle's worst mental torture. That young teacher, "Rosy" Stevens, who had fetched her from B——, had this task. "Rosy," who was only thirty, was supposed to be having "a desperate affair of the heart" with an actor, which she discussed with the older girls. She was the most popular chaperone in the school because she was "dead easy" and connived at much that might have resulted scandalously. "Rosy" shared the girls' tastes for sweets, dress, and jewelry, and smuggled into the Hall, not candy—because that was openly permitted in any quantity—but forbidden "naughty" novels.
Miss Stevens had the deadliest weapon at her command that Adelle had ever encountered—sarcasm. "My dear girl," she would say before a tableful of girls, in the pityingly sweet tone of an experienced woman of the world to a vulgar nobody, "how can you speak like that!" (This when Adelle had emitted the vernacular grunt in answer to some question.) "You are not a little ape, my dear." Then she would mimic in her dainty drawl Adelle's habit of speech, which, of course, set all the girls at the table tittering. Adelle naturally did not love "Rosy," but she was helpless before her darts. The other teachers generally ignored her presence, treating her with the perfect politeness of complete indifference. Once, soon after her arrival, the child was caught talking with one of the housemaids in the upper corridor, and was severely reprimanded. She had merely sought for a ray of human sunlight, but she was told that young women of her station in life were never familiar with servants. In a word, Adelle was more nearly encased in an airproof lining at Herndon Hall than ever before, and remained for another two years the pale, furtive, undeveloped child she was when she first came. Some cures, it seems, are so radical that they paralyze the nervous system and develop rather than cure the disease. Such was the case of Adelle in Herndon Hall. For nearly two years she sneaked about its comfortable premises, a silent, forlorn, miserable little being, frightened at what she could not understand, ready for a blow, but not keen enough to put up a protecting hand. The verdict of the school was that "the little fright of a Clark girl" was too stupid to learn anything. As one girl said to "Rosy,"—"The Clark girl must have piles of money to be here at all."
And the teacher replied,—"She'll need it all, every cent, she's so deadly common."
Let no reader suppose that Herndon Hall in which Adelle was suffering her martyrdom is typical of all fashionable girls' boarding-schools. In a real sense nothing in this life is sufficiently universal to be considered typical. There are to-day many schools that have some of the characteristics of Herndon Hall, though fortunately fewer than there were when Adelle got her education. But even at that time there were many excellent schools for girls where the teachers made sincere efforts to teach the girls something, where the girls were human and well-bred, and the teachers were kind and sympathetic and would not have tolerated such conduct as went on almost openly in this "exclusive" establishment, nor such brutal treatment as the girls dealt out to Adelle.
Herndon Hall, with its utterly false standards of everything that concerns woman's being, was the fruit of those ideals that have obtained about women, their position and education, for many centuries. And Herndon Hall was Adelle's accident—the fate to which the trust officers in all good will consigned her. There always is and must be, even in our own enlightened age of feminist movements, a Herndon Hall—perhaps more than one. Parents who believe that marriage and "a suitable position in society" are all there is in life for a woman will always create Herndon Halls.
XII
If the history of Clark's Field and those whom it concerned were an idealistic or romantic story, striving to present the world as it ought to be rather than as it often happens to be, our little heroine should at this crisis awaken from her apathy. Her spark of a soul should be touched by some sympathetic agent,—one of the teachers who had lived sadly and deeply, or some generous exception among her school-fellows, who would extend a protecting wing to the persecuted girl. No doubt even in Herndon Hall there were such who might have answered at a pinch to regenerate Adelle and start her forth on a series of physical if not spiritual adventures that would be exhilarating to the reader. But nothing of the sort came into her life at this period. She was too unpromising to arouse the incipient Samaritans.