CHAPTER IX
A QUARREL
You had your choice, at Miss Leland's, between studying, and doing what the large majority of the girls did; namely, making friends, reading novels during your study periods, and leaving it to Providence to decide whether you passed your examinations or not. The teachers were lenient souls, with the exception of Miss Drinkwater, the Latin teacher, who was unreasonably irritable when her pupils came to class armed with the seraphic smiles of ignorance, and a number of convincing excuses, which invariably failed to convince Miss Drinkwater. In consequence, very few of the girls pursued their studies in that classic tongue longer than the first month. "What point was there in doing so?" they argued coolly; none of them had any aspirations toward college, and nearly all of them harbored a dread of learning anything that might show on the surface, and thereby discourage the attentions of the college youths which were of infinitely more importance in their eyes, as indeed, in the eyes of their fond mothers, likewise, than the attainment of the scholarly graces.
Miss Leland's was one of those schools instituted primarily to meet the necessity of our young plutocrats for mingling with their own peculiar kind—"forming advantageous connections," it is called—the question of education was secondary if not quite negligible. The daughters of steel magnates came from Pittsburgh to meet the daughters of railroad magnates from New York, and incidentally to meet one another's brothers, at the small social functions which Miss Leland gave ostensibly for the purpose of developing in her charges an easy poise and the most correct drawing-room manners.
The girls, for the most part, regarded lessons as a wholly unnecessary adjunct to their school duties, and treated them as such. And this was all very well indeed, so far as they were concerned. From school they would plunge into the whirl of their débutante season, and from that into marriage—it was all clearly mapped out for them, and the shadow of any serious doubt as to the course of their careers never fell across their serenely trustful indolence.
There is something peculiarly vitiating in such an atmosphere. Pleasure was regarded not merely as an embroidery on the sober fustian of life, but as the very warp and woof of it; where the most sober consideration was that of winning popularity and the opportunity of social advantages, where the clothes to be bought and the parties to be given during the holidays were already the subject of endless absorbing discussions.
The effect of all this on each of the Prescotts was diametrically opposed. Alma had adapted herself to it as easily as to a new cloak. Not having any stubborn notions of her own, she was as malleable to such an environment as a piece of modelling clay in warm water. Pretty, good-humored, easily led, she swam into a rather meaningless popularity inside of four days. This Nancy was glad of, but her satisfaction was not unmixed. She saw Alma gradually undergoing a change that threatened to damage her own steadying influence over her sister, and to divide their sympathies. Alma was only too ready, and too well suited temperamentally, to lose sight of the difference between her own circumstances, and those of the girls with whom she was now associated. Indeed the very fact that she could do so, while Nancy could not, lay at the root of the problem that had begun to worry Nancy. Aside from minor changes in Alma, such as, for instance, a new little affectedness of manner, unconsciously borrowed from Mildred Lloyd, and her use of Mildred's particular slang phrases, Nancy had noticed in her sister at times a tinge of impatience, and a little air of superiority, with which Alma unwillingly listened to her when she tried to talk to her seriously. Nancy began to feel, unhappily, that Alma was coming to resent her efforts to guide her and advise her in regard to various small matters, and worst of all, that Alma was privately beginning to look upon her as rather unnecessarily serious, and even old-maidish.
It was impossible for Nancy to lose the feeling that she had that her mother had made a mistake in sending them to Miss Leland's, which gave them little or nothing that they could use, and was very likely to affect even her own steady vision of their circumstances and opportunities. She was continually trying to counteract the consequences of this mistake; but Alma was less than willing to take her point of view.
Nancy still clung to her plan of getting herself ready for college; never for a moment could she lose sight of the fact that in all probability she would have to make her own living, which Alma, like her mother, was very ready to forget, counting always as they did on happy chance, to smooth out the future for them into a sunny vista. It was not that Nancy was a pessimist. She simply believed that good luck was something more or less of one's own making. She was full of eagerness and enthusiasm for life, as ardent as an ambitious boy, and restive to make a trial of her own capabilities. She knew that there was a possibility of her uncle's providing for them, after all, in spite of his own very clear hints to the contrary; but on the other hand, there remained the fact that he was an eccentric old fellow, more than equally likely to bequeath his entire fortune to some freakish project, or obscure charity organization.