Nathan, conceded the smartest boy who attended the Academy, was ultimately set to work at four dollars a week. Johnathan bought his peace with his conscience by generously returning his son twenty-five cents a week to be “squandered” in any way the boy chose.
CHAPTER IX
BENDING THE TWIG
I
The girl Madelaine had been within three weeks of her eleventh birthday when Mrs. Theddon adopted her from the Corpus-Christi Orphanage.
If the child were precocious in a queer, matronly way, her clouded parentage and life at the Home were mainly responsible. She was intensely feminine and affectionate, fiercely maternal, all of which at first made for a certain distress when thrust out into the coëducational environment of the Springfield public schools with children of equal age.
Like some unmarried women, Mrs. Theddon was full of theories as to how a child should be reared. Yet the woman was neither bigoted nor maudlin. She had brains and common sense. If she held theories on child culture and child psychology, it was because she had evolved them from a shrewdness of observation when in contact with the offspring of affluent parents with whom she associated. There was no “private school nonsense” for her child therefore, until Madelaine was old enough to know the meaning and worth of exclusiveness. Beside, for a few years, Gracia Theddon wanted the little girl about her home and private tutors could never supply that academic atmosphere and class camaraderie which should be made chief among the heritages of adolescence.
So Madelaine went to the Forest Park school, and while the locality and its offspring were above normal, she stood out in her classes like an orchid in a thistle bed. She did careful, neat, thorough work and made friends. But she had no giggly age. No boys wrote asinine notes to her or tried to flirt with her. She shrank from participation in adolescent pranks.
At home she quickly absorbed the atmosphere of the Theddon household. She became an avid reader of everything in the big Theddon library. For hours at a time she lay stretched face downward along the window seat in the southeast corner of that splendid room, absorbed in the classics. And three years passed like white magic.
During her term in the ninth grade Madelaine grew perceptibly. It was an awkward time but never wholly distressing. At fifteen she was almost as tall as her foster-mother. Then she began to grow willowy, lithe and graceful.