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CHAPTER XII

“Ir 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 Oster-

hout 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, 125