"Dynamite for that institution and all like it! Nothing else would serve. With all your luxuriousness, Mona, your love of excitement, your carpe diem philosophy of life (Pat, who has 'taken' Latin, does not know what carpe diem signifies), your eagerness for the immediate satisfactions of the moment, you never let your brain become softened and untrained and fat. The higher interests were just as much a part of the embellishment of life to you as were flowers or games, music or friends. What inner friends will little Pat have? Not literature. Shakespeare she knows because she must; the school course requires it. But he is a task, not a delight. Thackeray is slow and Dickens a bore. Poetry is a mechanical exercise; I doubt whether a single really beautiful line of Shelley or Keats or Coleridge remains in her memory, though she can chant R. W. Service and Walt Mason. Swinburne she has read on the sly, absorbing none of the luminousness of his flame; only the heat. Similarly, Balzac means to her the 'Contes Drolatiques,' also furtively perused. Conrad and Wells are vague names; something to save until she is older. But O. Henry she dutifully deems a classic and is quite familiar with his tight-rope performances; proud of it, too, as evincing an up-to-date erudition. As for 'the latest books of the day,' she is keen on them, particularly if they happen to be some such lewd and false achievement as the intolerable 'Arab.' Any book spoken of under the breath has for her the stimulus of a race; she must absorb it first and look knowing and demure when it is mentioned. The age of sex, Mona.... Her standards of casual reading are of like degree; she considers Town Topics an important chronicle and Vanity Fair a symposium of pure intellect.
"Yet she has been taking a course in Literature at the school!
"Science has no thrill for Pat; therefore she ignores it. Futile little courses in 'How to Know' things like flowers and birds and mushrooms have gone no deeper than the skin. No love of nature has been inculcated by them. She hardly knows the names of the great scientists. Einstein she recognises through having seen his travels chronicled and heard vaudeville jokes about him. But mention Pasteur or Metchnikoff and you would leave her groping; and she doubtless would identify Lister as one who achieved fame by inventing a mouth wash. However, she could at once tell you the name of the fashionable physician to go to for nervous breakdown.
"Her economics are as vague as her science. Politics are a blank. But to be found ignorant of the most recent trend of the movies or the names of their heroes, or not to know the latest gag of some unspeakable vulgarian of the revues—that would overwhelm her with shame. Her speech and thought are largely a reflection of the contemporary stage. Not the stage of Shaw and O'Neill, but of bedroom farce and trite musical comedy. Thus far she compares unfavourably in education with the average shop girl.
"In music and art the reckoning is better. But this again is largely inherited. If the sap-headed sisterhood have not fostered, they at least have not tainted her sound instincts in these directions. She has followed her own bent.
"As it is a professedly denominational school she has, of course, specialised or been specialised upon as a churchwoman. A very sound and correct churchwoman, but not much of a Godwoman. No philosophy and very little ethics are to be found in her religion. Worship is for her a bargain of which the other consideration is prayer. She gives to God certain praises and observances and asks in return special favours. 'I'll do this for you, God, and you do as much for me some day.' Her expectancy of assured returns she regards as a praiseworthy and pious quality known as faith. Blasphemy, of course. Not the poor child's. The sin, which is a sin of ignorance and loose thinking, is upon the sanctified sisterhood. They have classified the Deity for Pat: God as a social arbiter.
"The sisterhood are purists. Naturally. But purists only by negation. All the essential facts they dodge. True, there is a course in hygiene. It is conducted by a desiccated virgin who minces about the simple and noble facts of sex life as if she were afraid of getting her feet wet, and whose soul would shrivel within her could she overhear the casual conversation of the girls whom she purports to instruct. All that side of knowledge and conjecture they absorb from outside contacts. A worse medium would be hard to conceive. From what Pat indicates of the tittle-tattle of ingénues' luncheons, it would enlighten Rabelais and shock Pepys! And the current jokes between the girls and their boy associates of college age are chiefly innuendo and double entente based on sex. Pat cannot say 'bed' or 'leg' or 'skin' without an expectant self-consciousness. Some reechy sort of bedroom story has been lately going the rounds, the point of which is involved in the words 'nudge' and 'phone.' Every time either word is used in Pat's set, there are knowing looks and sniggers, and some nimble wit makes a quick turn of the context and gets his reward in more or less furtive laughter. It is not so much the moral side, it is the nauseous bad taste that sickens one. The mind decays in that atmosphere. Once Pat said to me: 'Bobs, you and Mr. Scott are the only clean-minded men I know.' Think of what that means, Mona! The viciousness of such an environment. Yet the youngsters themselves are not essentially vicious; not many of them. They are curious with the itchy curiosity of their explorative time of life, and they have no proper guidance. The girls are worse off than the boys who do gain some standards in college. But our finishing schools, churchly or otherwise! Hell is paved with their good intentions. Pat's is not worse than the others, I suppose. But the pity of it; the waste of it for her. Hers is such a vivid mind; such a brave, straightforward little mind; at war with that hungry, passionate temperament of hers, yet instinctively clean if it could be protected from befoulment. I have been talking biology with her and she absorbs it with such swift, sure appreciation. The day of trial for her will come when the lighter amusements pall and her brain demands something to feed on—unless before that time it becomes totally encysted.
"Cary Scott's influence on her is good. She likes and respects him and is a little afraid of him, too. He has a quality of quiet contempt for cheap and shoddy things to which she responds, though not always without bursts of her fiery little temper. If he were less of the natural aristocrat in all the outer attributes he would not impress her so. Meantime I am glad to see him take some interest even though it be but a playfully intellectual one, in anyone who will divert his mind from Constance. Sometimes I have thought disaster imminent in that quarter. Disaster! How readily one falls into the moralist's speech, and how your dear lips would quirk at that tone from me, dearest. Yet a liaison between those two would be potentially disastrous. For Connie has nothing to give to a man like Cary Scott except her beauty. If he is the man I think him, he will never take her for that alone; or, if he does, be long satisfied with it. Yet her charm is terribly strong.... I wonder whether you really loved Cary Scott, Mona, as I have loved and still love you...."
Coming downstairs after writing this letter, from the dead woman's room where a desk had been set aside for him as executor of her estate, Osterhout found Cary Scott, dressed in evening clothes, waiting in the library. On his return from his trip abroad Scott had unobtrusively resumed his established place at Holiday Knoll. He had seen as much of Constance as before, perhaps more, because Dee, between whom and Scott a very frank and easy friendship had grown up, was occupied with Jameson James to the partial exclusion of other associations, and therefore Scott was less with her than formerly. He did not like James.
Scott and the doctor greeted each other cordially.