Patricia (2 page)

When Patricia Prentiss was a little girl, there had been a battle royal between her father and mother concerning the school she would attend.

George Prentiss was a kindly, grave man with a great ability to make money and a few old-fashioned ideas to which he clung stubbornly. For the rest he let his wife have her way.

Mainly his old-fashioned ideas were three in number. He did not believe in drinking intoxicating liquors. He had always attended church regularly in the same old church where his father and mother, and their fathers and mothers, had attended church, and he always would—even though the denomination and most of the congregation had abandoned the old plain structure and built a fine new edifice, selling the old one to a small nondenominational group, who were utterly beyond the pale socially. George Prentiss had allied himself with the minority and stayed in the old church, with the nondenominational group.

And finally, he believed that the public school was the only proper place in which to secure an education.

In the matter of liquor, his wife had more or less come off victorious. It was the first battle of their married life, and she claimed that life would be a desert drear if she couldn't have cocktails at her parties, that people all did it nowadays and she would die of shame if she couldn't do as others did. It had been a long steady conflict, but gradually she had dominated. Little by little liquor was served at the Prentiss table at social occasions. Usually the head of the house absented himself from the town when he knew what was to be, and he never drank himself when he was forced by circumstances to be present.

In the matter of church attendance, Amelia Prentiss made several decisive gestures in the direction of a fashionable and formal place of worship. George went with her once and balked. It was not his idea of a place to worship God, and he would not go there again. She might do as she liked, but he would continue to worship where he always had worshipped. No amount of argument sufficed to move him, and finally, his wife, not keen on going to church herself, settled down to long restful Sabbath mornings in bed, to be ready for lovely, stately social teas in the late afternoon and Sunday evening musicales.

But when it came to the matter of where to send their only child to school, George rose right up and planted his foot down on principle. No, Patricia should not go to Miss Delicia Greystone's Select School for Girls. There might be girls' schools that were worth going to, but this one was not. Patricia should not be trained to be a little empty-headed snob. She should go to a good, honest public school the way her father had done, get a little idea of the way the world was made up of all kinds of people, and not think she was “it.”

It lasted a week, that battle, and cost so much in courage and pain and sleeplessness that George Prentiss resolved he would never fight another, no matter what was involved. But he won. Amelia shed plenty of tears, cast reproach upon him, and even said he had deceived her when he married her. That she thought he was a man of refined feelings and high ambitions, and it seemed he was instead wedded to low, uncultured things. That he was even willing to have his charming angel-child herd among the rabble in the public schools, where she would acquire low tastes, worse language, and the manners of common people. She wept so copiously that several times George Prentiss had to leave the house and walk out in the country to the old farm, which he still owned, to get near to sky and trees and realize that he wasn't after all the low-lived criminal that Amelia had been trying to make him out.

But when he returned—his spirit rested and his vision cleared by a sight of the sky and the green trees and grass, with a touch of the old home fraught with sweet memories—he would come into the house with his jaw set firmly, reminding his wife of the days when she used to contemplate him from afar and wonder if he wasn't a bit too set in his ways to make pleasant company for her life.

On one such occasion she eyed him through the evening meal between scant conversation and finally remarked with the advent of the dessert she knew he liked:

“Well, I've made arrangements for Patricia to enter Miss Greystone's school Monday morning. She's not to lose her grade by the transfer. In fact, they've agreed to guarantee that she will pass as usual in the spring. She is to have dear little Gwendolyn Champney as a seatmate and be in the same grade with Thornton Bellingham. They are giving our child every advantage possible, and I'm quite delighted!” she finished with complacence. “She'll be free from that awful public school at last!”

Patricia, sitting in front of her untouched dessert, listened aghast, her eyes fixed on her mother's exalted countenance. Her mother was eating away at the thick meringue on her fat orange custard pie and omitting to watch the expressions on the faces of her husband and child.

Patricia could usually be counted on to behave quietly like a lady and not intrude into the general conversation unless asked a question, but on this occasion she was too deeply stirred to remember her manners, and suddenly her wide lovely blue eyes brimmed with big tears, a look of desperate panic went over her beautiful little face, and she broke forth in an awful and most unwonted rebellion.

“Oh! I don't want to leave my lovely public school!” she burst out in a scream of fear. “And I
won't
go to that silly old Greystone School. I won't! I won't! I
won't
! I
never
won't! They're all sissies and dummies that go to that school! Oh, Daddy, I can't go to an old stuck-up school like that and have all my own school laughing at me and saying I couldn't keep up with my class!”

She finished the end of her sentence by jumping down from her seat and hiding her face in her father's neck, where she stood and wailed her heart out.

Her father's arm went comfortingly, firmly around her, and his voice came soothingly into her ear.

“There, there, there! Daddy's little girl! Of course you shan't go to that silly old stuck-up school. Of course you're going to stay in your nice fine healthy public school. Don't you worry. That's one thing your daddy will see to, that you stay in the public school where he got his education. Nobody is going to cheat you out of that!”

“And I don't wanna sit with that old Gwendolyn,
ever
!” she went on. “She makes faces at me and calls me ‘old publicher.' I
hate
her! She copies her zaminations off other girls' papers, too. Betty Brower told me.”

“Of course you don't want to sit with her,” thundered her thoroughly provoked father. “Her father's a crook, and her mother's a fool—!”

“George!” said his wife angrily. “Just please to remember that you are talking about one of my very closest friends!”

“Well, I'm sorry for you if you can call that painted piece of emptiness a friend!” sneered George Prentiss. “But I'm hoping my daughter will come up in the public school with a little more discernment than you got in that precious private institution where I understood you couldn't even graduate, my dear! I certainly don't intend to run any risks with Pat.”

“I certainly wish you would call Patricia by her name! Not by that dreadful boyish nickname,
Pat
! I despise it!” said Patricia's mother furiously. “You just encourage uncouthness by calling her that. And she's coming up with no manners at all in that awful school you insist she shall attend. Her language is simply impossible, calling respectable children dummies and sissies! It is unspeakable! I'm afraid to have her speak in front of my friends lest she'll say something utterly common.”

“If the friends you've been speaking of tonight are the ones you mean, I don't think they'd know the difference!” said her husband. “That Champney woman grew up in the back country and, to my special knowledge, went to a little red schoolhouse three miles away from her ramshackle home. I know that for a fact, for one of the men in our office went to the same school. And as for the Bellingham dame, I doubt if she ever had very many intellectual advantages, if one can judge by the expressions she uses.”

“George! You are unspeakable! Can't you realize that a young child ought not to hear her father talk that way?”

“Well, how about her mother? She isn't a babe in arms, and she's old enough to realize that the children you are urging upon her as playmates are second rate.”

“Now what do you mean by that, Mr. Prentiss? Who, I ask you, is second rate? Patricia knows better than that. She knows they are superior children. Who, I ask you, are the children who attend Madame's select dancing class?”

“Dancing class!” snorted the father. “Oh, if you are counting the children whose brains are in their heels and toes, perhaps you might carry your point; but from all I've heard Pat say, I don't think she admires them very much.”

“Now, Mr. Prentiss, you're utterly mistaken,” said his wife severely. “Patricia, why don't you speak up and tell the truth! You do love the dear little girls and boys who go to dancing class with you, don't you, darling?”

“
No!
” sobbed the child. “Only Betty Brower, and she's moving away!”

“Well, I certainly am thankful for that! Little low-lived thing! George, you don't in the least realize what low-lived plebeian tastes Patricia is acquiring. But, darling—” addressing the weeping Patricia again, “you do like that dear little Thornton Bellingham, you know you do, don't you, darling?”

“
No!
” said Patricia. “He's a
sissy
and a bully!”

“Oh,
my dear
! You mustn't talk like that. Remember the pretty box of candy he brought you the other day! And his mamma says it was entirely his own little idea. He asked if he might buy it for you!”

“He ate every piece of peppermint out of it, and all the candied cherries!” sobbed Patricia, remembering a new grievance. “He's nothing but a little
pig
!”

The mother turned a cold, disapproving expression toward her husband.

“George, I hope you perceive what an unprofitable conversation you have started!” she said in a haughty tone that promised a fuller explanation later in the evening.

“Unprofitable?” said her husband. “To whom? You? Yes, I can see that. But you're mistaken about who started it. It was you, I think, that introduced the subject of schools by stating that you had been making arrangements for Pat to go to the Delicious woman's school, after I told you in very plain language that never should a child of mine darken her doors! I just want to make a single statement and then I'm done with the subject. I still mean what I said about that, and Pat is going to continue to attend the public school! It was good enough for her father, and it is going to stay good enough for his child till she graduates. After that if she wants to take up with some of your tommyrot-highfalutin-schools, she can go her own gait, but she'll have to earn the money for it herself.”

So Patricia grew up in the public school, much to her mother's shame, who never ceased to lament and mourn about it and to blame her child loudly for every fault she could find, laying them all to her training among common people.

Patricia herself adored her school, secretly feeling elated that her lines had fallen in such pleasant places. She loved the big schoolyard where every child was wild and free and the rich and the poor partook alike of the joys of all the games. Her mother would have fainted in horror if she had known that her adored infant went hand in hand with two “mill” children of foreign parentage, through the thrills of “Crack the Whip” and “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”! Though once when Mrs. Prentiss was passing the school precincts at recess hour and caught a glimpse of the rough-and-tumble games, she advised her daughter to remain inside the schoolhouse during recess and wait for her exercise until after school.

But Patricia grew up with most democratic ideas concerning other children and sweetly, humbly made herself of no reputation. When the days of dancing school arrived and Patricia's mother reveled in the cunning dance dresses she bought her, Patricia discovered to her disappointment that not everybody in her beloved class at school had dance dresses and went to Madame Marchand's dancing school. She began to plan in her loving heart how she could extend the privileges of refinement to the others not so well favored. Once she was discovered by an eagle-eyed teacher down in the corner of the schoolyard teaching Jennie McGlynn how to lift the tips of her faded calico skirt and touch her toes lightly to make a curtsy, and she certainly would have seen to it that Jennie and her kind were supplied with pretty organdy dresses and bright sashes from her own ample store if she had had her way.

But she early learned that her mother disapproved of these less fortunate children, and she was not to bring them home or encourage any friendships whatever with them, and daily the lines of her social world were more and more definitely defined before her rebellious eyes.

At this juncture, desirables from other private schools were introduced into the scheme of things, at parties and social events connected with the dancing school, until Patricia had a fairly wide circle of acquaintances for one so young.