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.
"Seventeen--in September," Milly promptly corrected.
"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."
"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.