One Woman's Life. Robert Herrick

a church member while his wife lived, knowing his own unregenerate habits and having a healthy-minded male's aversion to hypocrisy, now went to church with his daughter quite regularly. He felt that it was a good thing—the right thing for the girl, in some way insuring her woman's safety in this wicked world, if not her salvation in the next.

      They made a pretty picture together, father and daughter—the girl with the wide blue eyes and open mouth, standing shoulder to shoulder with the little man, each with one gloved hand grasping an edge of the hymn-book and singing, Milly in a high soprano—

      "Nearer, my God, to Thee!"

      and Horatio, rumbling behind a little uncertainly—

      "Nearer to Thee—to THEE!"

IV

       Table of Contents

MILLY COMPLETES HER EDUCATION

       Table of Contents

      "Milly," Mrs. Kemp remarked thoughtfully, "aren't you going to complete your education?"

      Milly translated this formidable phrase in a flash—

      "You mean go to school any more? Why should I?"

      It was a warm June day. Milly had been reading to Mrs. Kemp, who was sewing. The book was "Romola." Milly had found quite dull its solid pages of description of old Florence sparsely relieved by conversation, and after a futile attempt to discover more thrilling matter farther on had abandoned the book altogether in favor of talk, which always interested her more than anything else in the world.

      "Why should I go to school?" she repeated.

      "You are only sixteen."

      "Seventeen—in September," Milly promptly corrected.

      Mrs. Kemp laughed.

      "I didn't finish school until I was eighteen."

      "School is so stupid," Milly sighed, with a little grimace. "I hate getting things out of books."

      She had never been distinguished in school—far from it. Only by real labor had she been able to keep up with her classes.

      "I guess the schools I went to weren't much good," she added.

      She saw herself behind a desk at the high school she had last attended in St. Louis. In front of her sat a dried, sallow, uncheerful woman of great age, ready to pounce upon her and expose her ignorance before the jeering class. The girls and the boys at the school were not "refined"—she knew that now. No, she did not want any more school of that sort. … Besides, what use could an education be, if she were not to teach? And Milly had not the faintest idea of becoming a teacher.

      "Do you think a girl needs to know a lot of stuff—stupid things in books?" she asked.

      "Women must have a better education than they once did," Eleanor Kemp replied with conviction. She refrained from explaining that a girl like Milly, with no social background, might marry "to advantage" on her looks, but she would need something more to maintain any desirable position in the world. Such ideas were getting into the air these days.

      "I'm going to take some music lessons," Milly yawned.

      "You have a good mind," her friend persisted flatteringly. "Do you know French."

      "A little," Milly admitted dubiously.

      "German?"

      Milly shook her head positively.

      "Latin?"

      "Latin! What for?"

      "I had two years of Latin. It's … it's cultivating."

      Milly glanced at the load of new books on the library table. She knew that the Kemps read together a great deal. They aspired to "stand for the best things" in the ambitious young city—for art, music, and all the rest. She was somewhat awed.

      "But what's the use of a girl's knowing all that?" she demanded practically.

      If a woman knew how to "write a good letter," when she was married, and could keep the house accounts when there were any, and was bright and entertaining enough to amuse her wearied male, she had all the education she needed. That was Milly's idea.

      "French, now, is so useful when one travels," Mrs. Kemp explained.

      "Oh, if one travels," Milly agreed vaguely.

      Later Mrs. Kemp returned to the attack and extolled the advantages, social and intellectual, that came with a Good Education. She described the Ashland Institute, where she had completed her own education and of which she was a recently elected trustee.

      "Mrs. Mason, the principal, is a very cultivated lady—speaks all the modern languages and has such a refining influence. I know you would like her."

      Milly had always attended public school. It had never occurred to her father that while the state was willing to provide an education he should go to the expense of buying one privately for his daughter. Of course Milly knew that there were fashionable boarding-schools. She wanted to attend a Sacred Heart convent school where one of her intimates—a Louisville girl—had been sent, but the mere idea had shocked Mrs. Ridge, senior, unutterably.

      It seemed that the Ashland Institute, according to Mrs. Kemp, was an altogether superior sort of place, and Milly was at last thoroughly fired with the idea that she should "finish herself" there. Her grandmother agreed that more schooling would not hurt Milly, but demurred at the expense. Horatio was easily convinced that it was the only proper school for his daughter. So the following September Milly was once more a pupil, enrolled in classes of "literature" (with a handbook), "art" (with a handbook), "science" (handbook), "mental and moral philosophy" (lectures), and French (La tulipe noire). Milly liked Mrs. Mason, a personable lady, who always addressed her pupils as "young ladies." And Milly was quickly fascinated by the professor of mental and moral philosophy, a delicate-looking young college graduate. She worked very hard, studying her lessons far into the night, memorizing long lists of names, dates, maxims, learning by rote whatever was contained in those dreary handbooks.

      Even in those days this was not all there was to education for girls like Milly. There were a few young women, east and west, bold enough to go to college. But as yet their example had no influence upon the general education dealt out to girls. Most girls whose parents had any sort of ambition went through the high school with their brothers, and then went to work—if they had to—or got married. Even for the privileged few who could afford "superior advantages" the ideas about women's education were chaos. Mrs. Mason solved the problem at the Ashland Institute as well as any, with a little of this and of that, elegant information conveyed chiefly in handbooks about "literature" and "art"; for women were assumed to be the "artistic" sex as they were the ornamental. There were, besides, deportment, dancing, and music, also ornamental. The only practical occupations were keeping house and nursing, and if a girl was obliged to do such things, she did not seek the aristocratic "finishing school." The "home" was the proper place for all that. In Milly's case the "home" was adequately run by her grandmother with the help of one colored servant. So Horatio, being just able to afford the tuition, Milly was privileged to "finish herself."

      Of course she forgot all the facts so laboriously acquired within a short six months after she read her little essay on "Plato's Conception of the Beautiful" at the graduation exercises. (That effort, by the way, lay heavy on the neighborhood for weeks, but was pronounced a triumph. It was certainly a masterpiece of fearless quotation.) … Learning passed over Milly like a summer sea over a shining sandbar and left no trace behind, none whatever. It was the same way with music. Milly could sing church hymns in a pleasant voice and thumped a little heavily on the piano after learning her piece. … She used to say, years afterward—"I have no gifts; I was never clever with