Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XII

"If I could find it in my heart, dearest one, to blame you for anything, it would be for sending little Pat to the Sisterhood School." (So wrote Robert Osterhout to Mona Fentriss.) "With the best of intentions they wreck a mind as thoroughly as house-wreckers gut a building. It was your choice and I dare not change it. Even if I could persuade Ralph to take her out of that environment and send her to Bryn Mawr or Vassar or Smith, which is where she ought to be, she would rebel. She has a contempt for 'those rah-rah girls,' a prejudice bred of the shallow and self-sufficient snobbery which is the basic lesson of her scholastic experience. To be sure, they have finished her in the outward attributes of good form, but most of that is a natural heritage which any daughter of yours would have. She can be, when on exhibition, the most impeccable little creature, sparkling, and easy and natural and charmingly deferential toward the older people with whom she comes in contact—when she chooses. For the most part she elects to be calmly careless, slovenly of speech and manner, or lightly impudent. To have good breeding at call but not to waste it on most people—that is the cachet of her set.

"But these are surface matters. It is the inner woman—yes, beloved—our little Pat is coming to conscious and dynamic womanhood—which concerns me now and would concern you could you be here. Appalls me, too. But perhaps that is because my standards are the clumsy man-standards. What is she going to get out of life for herself? What does all this meaningless preparation, [Pg 126]aside from the polishing process, look to? If hers were just a stupid, satisfied mind, a pattern intellect like Constance's, it would not so much matter. Or if she had the self-discipline and control which Dee's athletics have given her, I should be less troubled. But Pat's is a strange little brain; hungry, keen and uncontrolled. It really craves food, and it is having its appetite blunted by sweets and drugs. Is there nothing that I can do? I hear you ask it. Yes; now that she is at home I can train her a little, but not rigorously, for her mind is too soft and pampered to set itself seriously to any real task. In the days of her childish gluttony I used to drive her into a fury by mocking her for her pimples, and finally, by excoriating her vanity, got her to adopt a reasonable diet. The outer pimples are gone. But if one could see her mind, it would be found pustulous with acne. And there can I do little against the damnable influence of the school which has taught her that a hard-trained, clean-blooded mind is not necessary. The other girls do not go in for it. Why be a highbrow? She is so easily a leader in the school, and, as she boasts, puts it over the teachers in any way she pleases. In the days before she became aware of herself it used to be hard to get her to brush her teeth. To-day I presume that her worthy preceptresses would expel her if she did not use the latest dentifrice twice a day. But they are quite willing to let her mind become overlaid with foul scum for want of systematic brushing up.

"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[Pg 127] 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.