But as yet hers was only a very little air, which was quickly wilted by the oppressive luxury of the Glynns' country-place—one of those large, ostentatious establishments that Americans are wont to start before they know how, and where consequently the elaborate domestic machinery creaks. There were men-servants of different nationalities, ladies' maids, and a houseful of guests coming and going as in a private hotel. Adelle shrank into the obscurest corner and her anemonelike charm, tentatively putting forth, was quite lost in the scramble. Beechwood was a much less genial home than the slipshod Mexican haçienda of the Mereldas and nobody paid any attention to the shy girl. Eveline Glynn, who expected in another year to be free from school, was too much occupied with her own flirtations to bother herself about her chance guest. Adelle, being left to her usual occupation of silent observation, managed to absorb a good deal at Beechwood in four days, chiefly of the machinery of modern wealth. There were the elaborate meals, the drinking, the card-playing, the motors, the innumerable servants, and the sickening atmosphere of inane sentimentalism between the sexes. Everybody seemed to be having "an affair," and the talk was redolent of innuendo. Adelle had occasion to observe the potency of her lamp in this society. She worked it first upon the waiting-woman assigned to her, to whom she gave a large fee and who coached her devotedly in the ways of the house and supplied her with the gossip. It also brought her the annoying attentions of a middle-aged man, to whom her hostess had confided that the dumb little Clark girl was "awful rich."
At the end of the visit the girls went back to New York, under the chaperonage of "Rosy," to equip themselves for the school term, staying at a great new hotel, and here Adelle's corruption by her wealth was continued at an accelerated pace. The four girls flitted up and down the Avenue, buying and ordering what they would. There were definite limits to the purse of the Californians, but Adelle, perceiving the distinction to be had from free spending, ordered with a splendid indifference to price or amount. She won the admiration of her friends by the ease with which she gave her name and address. Adelle was in fact a little frightened by her own extravagance, but persisted with a child's curiosity to find out the limit of her magic lamp. She did not reach it, however. Mr. Crane at her request had opened an account for her at the trust company's correspondent on upper Fifth Avenue, and apparently it was of a size that produced respect in the heart of the shopkeeper.
All these purchases, the clothes and the jewelry and the other rubbish that the girl bought, gave her no special pleasure, gratified no desires: she did not know what she could do with half the things at Herndon Hall. What gave her keen pleasure was the prestige of lavish spending.... After a debauch of theaters and dinners and shopping, the four girls were again taken in tow by the sophisticated "Rosy" and went up the river to Herndon Hall for Adelle's third year of boarding-school.
XV
Adelle Clark was thoroughly infected with the corruption of property by this time, and the coming years merely confirmed the ideas and the habits that had been started. She was now seventeen and an "old girl" at the Hall, privileged to torture less sophisticated girls when they presented themselves, if she had felt the desire to do so. She had not forgotten her Church Street existence: it had been much too definite to be easily forgotten. But she had been removed from it long enough to realize herself thoroughly in her new life and to know that it was not a dream. She would always remember Church Street, her aunt and uncle, and the laborious years of poverty with which it was identified; but gradually that part of her life was becoming the dream, while Herndon Hall and the Aladdin lamp of her fortune were the reality. By means of the latter she had won her position among her mates, and naturally she respected more and more the source of her power. Eveline Glynn "took her up" this year, and quite replaced the gentler Diane Merelda in her affections.
There was if anything less study this year than before. The older girls scouted the idea of studying anything. Most of them expected to leave school forever the next spring and under the auspices of their mothers to enter the marriage game. A few intended as a preliminary to travel in Europe, "studying art or music," But the minds of all were much more occupied with love than anything else. Although the sex interest was still entirely dormant in Adelle, she learned a great deal about it from her schoolmates. Those good people who believe in a censorship of literature for the sake of protecting the innocent American girl should become enrolled at Herndon Hall. There they might be occasionally horrified, but they would come out wiser mortals. Adelle knew all about incredible scandals. Divorce, with the reasons for it,—especially the statutory one,—was freely discussed, and a certain base, pandering sheet of fashionable gossip was taken in at the Hall and eagerly devoured each week by the girls, who tried to guess at the thinly disguised persons therein pilloried. Thus Adelle became fully acquainted with the facts of sex in their abnormal as well as more normal aspects. That she got no special personal harm from this irregular education and from the example of "the two Pols" was due solely to her own unawakened temperament. Life had no gloss for her, and it had no poetic appeal. She supposed, when she considered the matter at all, that sometime as a woman she would be submitted to the coil of passion and sex, like all the others about whom her friends talked incessantly. They seemed to regard every man as a possible source of excitement to a woman. But she resolved for her part to put off the interference of this fateful influence as long as possible. Sometime, of course, she must marry and have a child,—that was part of the fate of a girl with money of her own,—and then she should hope to marry a nice man who would not scold or ill-treat her or prefer some other woman—that was all.
"Dell is just a lump of ice!" Irene Paul often said, putting her own plump arms about Adelle's thin little body; and while Adelle tried to wriggle out of the embrace she teased her by assuming the man's aggressive rôle.
Thus the last months of her formal education slipped by. Adelle went through the easy routine of the Hall like the other girls, riding horseback a good deal during pleasant weather, taking a lively interest in dancing, upon which great stress was laid by Miss Thompson as an accomplishment and healthy exercise. She took a mild share in the escapades of her more lively friends, but for the most part her life was dull, though she did not feel it. The life of the rich, instead of being varied and full of deep experience, is actually in most cases exceedingly monotonous and narrowing. The common belief that wealth is an open sesame to a life of universal human experience is a stupid delusion, frequently used as a gloss to their souls by well-intentioned people. Apart from the strict class limitations imposed by the possession of large property, the object of protected and luxurious people is generally merely pleasure. And pleasure is one of the narrowest fields of human experience conceivable, becoming quickly monotonous, which accounts for many extravagancies and abnormalities among the rich. Moreover, the sensual life of the well-fed and idle deadens imagination to such a degree that even their pleasures are imitative, not original: they do what their kind have found to be pleasurable without the incentive of initiative. If Adelle Clark had not been attached to Clark's Field and had been forced to remain in the Church Street rooming-house, by this time she would have been at work as a clerk or in some other business: in any case she must have touched realities closely and thus been immeasurably ahead of all the Herndon Hall girls.