The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867. Various
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sweetness and flexibility in the airs that enchant drawing-room audiences. She caught with great readiness the manner of the easiest girls, unconsciously, for she inherited old social instincts which became nature with the briefest exercise. Not much license of dress was allowed in the educational establishment of Madam Delacoste, but every girl had an opportunity to show her taste within the conventional limits prescribed. And Myrtle soon began to challenge remark by a certain air she contrived to give her dresses, and the skill with which she blended their colors.
"Tell you what, girls," said Miss Berengaria Topping, female representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous Planet Hotel, "she's got style, lots of it. I call her perfectly splendid, when she's got up in her swell clothes. That oriole's wing she wears in her bonnet makes her look gorgeous,—she'll be a stunning Pocahontas for the next tableau."
Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from, thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken in hand in good season. So it came about that, before many weeks had passed over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment, she might be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the whole bevy of them. The studious ones admired her for her facility of learning, and her extraordinary appetite for every form of instruction, and the showy girls, who were only enduring school as the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of society, recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be like to make a sensation sooner or later.
There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who submitted her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.
"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe. "We keep nine and a pony for Edgar."
Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not keep any horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-bonnet-maker) that the school was getting common, she was afraid,—they were letting in persons one knew nothing about.
Miss Clara Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate used in the household from which Myrtle came. Her father had just bought a complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a good deal of china at her own home,—old china, which had been a hundred years in the family, some of it.
"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clara Browne. "What queer-looking stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as new and bright! Papaä had all our pictures painted on purpose for us. Have you got any handsome pictures in your house?"
"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said, "some of them older than the china."
"How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?"
"One was a great beauty in her time."
"How jolly!"
"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,—burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."
"How very very wicked! It wasn't nice a bit, was it? Ain't you telling me stories? Was that a hundred years ago?—But you've got some new pictures and things, haven't you? Who furnished your parlors?"
"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."
"Stuff and nonsense. I don't believe it. What color are your carriage-horses?"
"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse but a cow."
"Not keep any horses! Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."
Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess. After all, the questions amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne. Of that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of discoursing. Her "papaä" commonly said sir in talking with a gentleman, and her "mammaä" would once in a while forget, and go down the area steps instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived in a brown-stone front, which veneers everybody's antecedents with a facing of respectability.
Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss Florence Smythe,—that the school was getting dreadful common, and they were letting in very queer folks.
Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a thousand would have been so unprepared to meet. She knew absolutely nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons were quite familiar.
There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally, perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have left alone. One of the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.
"O, isn't Pickwick nice?" she asked.
"I don't know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."
The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature. "Tasted any! Why, I mean the Pickwick Papers, Dickens's story. Don't you think they're nice?"
Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and didn't know anything about them.
"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.
"O, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the great trunk and its contents. "I have read Caleb Williams, and Evelina, and Tristram Shandy" (naughty girl!), "and the Castle of Otranto, and the Mysteries of Udolpho, and the Vicar of Wakefield, and Don Quixote—"
The young lady burst out laughing. "Stop! stop! for mercy's sake," she cried. "You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and come back to life again. Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat! You ought to powder your hair and wear patches."
"We've got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home. "She hasn't read any book that isn't a thousand years old. One of the girls says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago. Her name, she says, is Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."
Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few young gentlemen were admitted. One of these took place about a month after Myrtle had joined the school. The girls were all in their best, and by and by they were to have a tableau. Myrtle came out in all her force. She dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome woman of the past generation whom she resembled. The very spirit of the dead beauty seemed to animate every feature and every movement of the young girl, whose position in the school was assured from that moment. She had a good solid foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading girls of the style of pretensions illustrated by some of their talk which has been given. There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other, if it does not hit or trample on it.
The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston Jenkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called the great "swell" among the privileged young gentlemen who were present at the gathering.
"Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara? By Jove, she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being a first-class beauty. Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara. If a girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like that, I know a good many who had better begin their nap without waiting. If I were Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,—eh, Clara?"
Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by the depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her own. A little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost precisely the same sensation, produced in a very economical way by Mr. Livingston Jenkins's repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments to her, only with a change in two of the proper names. The two young ladies were left feeling comparatively comfortable with regard to each other, each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston Jenkins's remark about her friend to such of her other friends as enjoyed clever sayings, but not