"Come in, then, Monday morning!" And the trust officer went homewards to confide his perplexity to his wife as trust officers sometimes do. It was a queer business, his. As trust officer he had once gone out to some awful place in Dakota to take charge of the remains of a client who had got himself shot in a brawl, and brought the body back and buried it decently in a New England graveyard with his ancestors. He had advised young widows how to conduct themselves so that they should not be exposed to the wiles of rapacious men. Once even he had counseled matrimony to a client who was difficult to control and had approved, unofficially, of her selection of a mate. A good many of the social burdens of humanity came upon his desk in the course of the day's business, and he was no more inhuman than the next man. He was a father of a respectable family in the neighboring suburb of Chester. His habit was naturally to hunt for the proper formula for each situation as it arose and to apply this formula conscientiously. According to Mr. Gardiner, the duty of trust companies to society consisted in applying suitable formulas to the human tangles submitted to them by their clients. And in the present case Mrs. Gardiner suggested the necessary formula.
"Why don't you send the girl to a good boarding-school? You say she's fifteen and will have money."
"Yes,--some money, perhaps a good deal," her husband replied. Even in the bosom of his family, the trust officer was guarded in statement.
"What difference does it make how much, so long as we can pay her school bills?"
"It makes all the difference in the world!" the wife replied, with the superior tone of wisdom. "It makes the difference whether you send her to St. Catherine's or Herndon Hall."
It will be seen that the trust officer's wife believed in that clause of the catechism that recommends contentment with that state of life to which Providence hath called one, and also that education should fit one for the state of life to which he or she was to be called by Providence. St. Catherine's, as the trust officer very well knew, was a modest institution for girls under the direction of the Episcopal Church, for which he served as trustee, where needy girls were cheaply provided with a "sensible" education, and "the household arts" were not neglected. In other words, the girls swept their rooms, made their own beds, and washed the dishes after the austere repasts, and the fee was correspondingly small. Whereas Herndon Hall--well, every one who has young daughters to launch upon the troubled sea of social life, and the ambition to give them the most exclusive companionship and no very high regard for learning,--at least for women,--knows all about Herndon Hall, by that name or some other equally euphonious. The fees at Herndon Hall were fabulous, and it was supposed to be so "careful" in its scrutiny of applicants that only those parents with the best introductions could possibly secure admission for their daughters. There were, of course, no examinations or mental tests of any kind.