he beribboned diploma for good conduct which her
favourite pupil had borne away from the Academy on Commencement day two
years ago, and a shudder seized her lest she should have left a single
unprotected breach in the girl's mind through which an unauthorized idea
might enter. Had she trusted too confidently to the fact that Virginia's
father was a clergyman, and therefore spiritually armed for the defence
and guidance of his daughter? Virginia, in spite of her gaiety, had been
what Miss Priscilla called "a docile pupil," meaning one who
deferentially submitted her opinions to her superiors, and to go through
life perpetually submitting her opinions was, in the eyes of her parents
and her teacher, the divinely appointed task of woman. Her education
was founded upon the simple theory that the less a girl knew about life,
the better prepared she would be to contend with it. Knowledge of any
sort (except the rudiments of reading and writing, the geography of
countries she would never visit, and the dates of battles she would
never mention) was kept from her as rigorously as if it contained the
germs of a contagious disease. And this ignorance of anything that could
possibly be useful to her was supposed in some mysterious way to add to
her value as a woman and to make her a more desirable companion to a man
who, either by experience or by instinct, was expected "to know his
world." Unlike Susan (who, in a community which offered few
opportunities to women outside of the nursery or the kitchen, had been
born with the inquiring spirit and would ask questions), Virginia had
until to-day accepted with humility the doctrine that a natural
curiosity about the universe is the beginning of infidelity. The chief
object of her upbringing, which differed in no essential particular from
that of every other well-born and well-bred Southern woman of her day,
was to paralyze her reasoning faculties so completely that all danger of
mental "unsettling" or even movement was eliminated from her future. To
solidify the forces of mind into the inherited mould of fixed beliefs
was, in the opinion of the age, to achieve the definite end of all
education. When the child ceased to wonder before the veil of
appearances, the battle of orthodoxy with speculation was over, and Miss
Priscilla felt that she could rest on her victory. With Susan she had
failed, because the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell was one of those
inexplicable variations from ancestral