Are Parents People?
Alice Duer Miller
9781465656377
330 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The girls marched into chapel singing Jerusalem the Golden. Some of the voices were shrill and piping, and some were clear and sweet; but all had that peculiar young freshness which always makes old hearts ache, and which now drew tears to the eyes of many visiting parents looking down from the gallery, and trying not to crane their necks conspicuously when their own offspring appeared in the aisle below. On Sundays the whole school came out in blue serge and black velvet tam-o'-shanters. The little girls marched first—some as young as eleven years—and as they came from the main school buildings and marched up the long aisle they were holding the high notes, "Jerusalem the golden," and their voices sounded like young birds', before the older girls came crashing in with the next line, "With milk and honey blest." They marched quickly—it was a tradition of the school—divided to right and left, and filed into their appointed places. Last of all came the tall senior president, and beside her a little figure that hardly reached her shoulder, and seemed as if one of the younger children were out of place; yet this was an important figure in the life of the school—Lita Hazlitt, the chairman of the self-government committee. Her face was almost round except for a small point that was her chin; her hair—short curls, not ringlets—curved up on her black velvet tam, and was blond, but a dusky blond. There was something alert, almost naughty in her expression, although at the moment this was mitigated by an air of discretion hardly avoidable by the chairman of the self-government committee in church. In this, her last year at Elbridge Hall, she had come to love the chapel. Its gray stone and dark narrow windows of blue or amethyst, the organ and the voices, gave her a sense of peace almost mystic—a mood she could never have attained unaided, for hers was a nature essentially practical. Like most practical people, she was kind. It was so easy for Lita to see what was needed—to do a problem in geometry or mend a typewriter or knit a sweater—that she was always doing such things for her friends, not so much from unselfishness as from sheer competence. The seniors sat in the carved stalls against the wall, and Lita liked to rest her hand on the rounded head of a dragon which made the arm of her chair. It had a polished surface and the knobs of the ears fitted into her fingers. "Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us, in sundry places, to acknowledge and confess—" Lita loved the words of the service, and she noted that part of their beauty was the needless doubling of words—dissemble and cloak—assemble and meet together—requisite and necessary. Yet Miss Fraser, who taught English at Elbridge, would call that tautology in a theme.... She sank on her knees, burying her small nose in her hands for the general confession. As they rose from their knees and the choir broke out into O Come, let us sing unto the Lord, Lita allowed herself one glance at the gallery, where her lovely mother was just rising, slim and erect, with a bearing polite rather than devout. Lita could see one immaculate gray glove holding her prayerbook. She was a beautifully dressed person. The whole school had an orgy of retrimming hats and remaking dresses after Mrs. Hazlitt had spent a Sunday at Elbridge. She was as blond as her daughter, except that somehow in the transmission of the family coloring she had acquired a pair of enormous black eyes from some contradictory ancestor. Even across the chapel Lita could see the dark splotches that were her mother's eyes. It was great fun—the Sundays that Mrs. Hazlitt came to the school, and yet Lita was always a little nervous. Her mother said anything that came into her head—simply anything, commenting on teachers and making fun of rules. The girls loved it, of course, but sometimes— The First Lesson had begun.
