I
As the theatre, in my memory, still gives the crowning glory to my
holiday in Philadelphia, so, in looking back, the brief holiday seems
the spectacle, the romance, the supreme moment, of my early years. The
scene of my every-day life was that Convent of the Sacred Heart at
Torresdale which was the end of the interminable ride in the Third
Street horse-car and the shorter ride in the Pennsylvania Railroad
train.
The Philadelphian who did not live in the Convent would have seen it the
other way round, for the Convent was unlike enough to Philadelphia to
suggest the romance of the unusual. Only in one or two respects did it
provide me with facts that every proper Philadelphian was brought up to
know, and let me say again that because I had to find out the
others--the more characteristically Philadelphia facts--for myself, I
think they probably made a stronger impression upon me than upon the
Philadelphian guiltless of ever straying, or of ever having been allowed
to stray, from the approved Philadelphia path.
II
When the Ladies of the Sacred Heart decided to open a Convent in
Philadelphia, an uncertain enterprise if it is considered how
un-Catholic Philadelphia was, they began in a fairly modest way by
taking a large house at Torresdale, with lawns and gardens and woods and
a great old-fashioned barn, the country seat of a Philadelphian whose
name I have forgotten. It stood to the west of the railroad, at a
discreet distance from the little cluster of houses by the riverside
that alone meant Torresdale to the Philadelphians who lived in them.
The house, I can now see, was typical as I first knew it, the sort the
Philadelphian built for himself in the suburbs at a period too removed
from Colonial days for it to have the beauty of detail and historic
interest of the Colonial house, and yet near enough to them for dignity
of proportion and spaciousness to be desirable, if not essential to a
Philadelphian's comfort. A wide, lofty hall ran from the front door to
the back, on either side were two large airy rooms with space between
for the broad main stairway, a noble structure, and the carefully
concealed back stairway--half-way up which in my time was the little
infirmary window where, at half past ten every morning, Sister Odille
dispensed pills and powders to those in need of them. Along the entire
front of the house was a broad porch,--the indispensable Philadelphia
piazza--its roof supported by a row of substantial columns over which
roses and honeysuckle clambered fragrantly and luxuriantly in the June
sunshine. The house was painted a cheerful yellow that went well with
the white of the woodwork about the windows and the porch: not a very
beautiful type of house, but pleasant, substantial, luxurious, and
making as little outward show of its luxury as the plain red brick town
house of the wealthy Philadelphian.
How comfortable a type of house it was to live in, I know from
experience of another, not a school, within sight, a ten minutes' walk
across the fields, and like it in design and arrangement and even
colour, in everything except size,--which my Father took one summer: to
me a most memorable summer as it was the first I spent outside the
Convent limits from the beginning to the end of the long holiday. The
jerry-builder had had no part in putting up the solid, well-constructed
walls which stood firm against winter storms and winds, and were no less
a protection from the torrid heat of a Philadelphia summer. But fashion
can leave architecture no more alone than dress. Already, the newer
group of houses down by the Delaware were built of the brown stone
which, to my mind, dates the beginning of the Philadelphian's fall from
architectural grace, the beginning of his distrust in William Penn's
plans for his well-being and of his foolish hankering after the
fleshpots of New York.
[Illustration: LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN]
The Convent, before I came to it, had been a victim to the brown stone
fashion. With success, the pleasant old country house had grown too
small for the school into which it had been converted, and a southern
wing had been added: a long, low building with the Chapel at the far
end, all built in brown stone and in a style that passed for Gothic and
that a thousand times I could have wished based upon any other model.
For the upper room in the wing, ambitiously christened by somebody
Gothic Hall, had a high pointed roof that made it an ice-house in winter
and, for our sins, it was used as the Dormitory of the Sacred Heart
where I slept. I can recall mornings when the water was frozen in our
pitchers while the big stove, in the middle of the high-pitched room,
burned red hot as if to mock at us as, with numbed fingers, we struggled
to make our beds and wash ourselves and button and hook on our clothes.
And the builders had so contrived that summer turned our fine Gothic
Dormitory into a fiery furnace. How many June nights, contrary to all
the rules, have I hung out of the little, horribly Gothic window at the
head of my alcove, gasping in the warm darkness that was so sweet and
stifling with the fragrance of the flowers in Madame Huguet's garden
just below.
I had not been long at the Convent before another brown stone wing
extended to the north and two stories were added to the main building
which, for the sake of harmony, was now painted brown from top to
bottom. In a niche on this new facade, a statue of the Sacred Heart was
set, and all semblance to the old country house was gone, except for the
broad porch without and the well-proportioned rooms within. But these,
and later improvements, additions and alterations cannot make me forget
the Convent as it was when I first came to it, growing up about the
simple, solidly-built, spacious yellow house that was once the
Philadelphian's ideal of suburban comfort and so like the house where I
spent my most memorable summer, so like, save for the size and the
colour, my Great-Grandfather Ambrose White's old house on the Turnpike
at Chestnut Hill, so like innumerable other country houses of the same
date where I visited.
III
The Convent rule and discipline could not alter the changing of the
seasons as Philadelphia ordered them. They might appear to us mainly
regulated by feasts and fasts--All Saints and All Souls, the milestones
on the road to Christmas; Lent and the month of St. Joseph heralding the
approach of spring; the month of Mary and the month of the Sacred Heart,
Ascension and Corpus-Christi, as ardent and splendid as the spring and
summer days they graced. But, all the same, each season came laden with
the pleasures held in common by all fortunate Philadelphia children who
had the freedom of the country or the countrified suburbs.
The school year began with the fall, when any night might bring the
first frost and the first tingle in the air--champagne to quicken the
blood in a school girl's veins, and make the sitting still through the
long study and class hours a torture. The woods shone with gold; the
Virginia creeper flamed on the front porch; sickel pears fell, ripe and
luscious, from the tree close to the Chapel where it was against the law
to go and pick them up but where no law in the world could have barred
the way; chestnuts and hickory nuts and the walnuts that stained my
fingers black to open offered a substantial dessert after as substantial
a dinner as ever children were served with. But those were the joyful
years when hunger never could be satisfied and digestion was equal to
any surfeit of raw chestnuts--or raw turnips for that matter, if the
season supplied no lighter dainties, or of next to anything that could
be picked up and eaten. I know I drew the line only at the huge, white,
oversweet mulberries strewing the grass by the swings in Mulberry Lane,
that favourite scene of the war to the knife we waged under the name of
Old Man and Bands, primitive games not to be outdone by the Tennis and
Hockey of the more sophisticated modern school girl.
The minute the Refectory was left for the noonday hour of recreation on
a brisk autumn day, there was a wild scamper to the woods where, just
beyond the gate that led into them, the hoary old chestnut trees spread
their shade and dropped their fruit on either side the hill between the
Poisonous Valley, a thrill in its deadly name, and the graveyard, few
crosses then in the green enclosure which now, alas! is too well filled.
The shadow of death lay so lightly upon us that I recall to-day only the
delicious rustle of eager feet through the fallen leaves, and the
banging of stone upon stone as hickory nuts cracked between them, I feel
only the delicious pricking of the chestnut burrs in the happy, hardened
fingers of the school girl. And these, anyway, are memories I share with
every Philadelphian who, as a child, wandered in the suburbs or the
near country when the woods were gold and scarlet, and the way through
them was carpeted with leaves hiding rich stores of nuts for the seeker
after treasure.
But no Philadelphia child in the shelter of her own house could know the
meaning of the Philadelphia winter as I knew it in the Convent, half
frozen in that airy dormitory of the Sacred Heart, shivering in shawl
and hood through early Mass in the icy Chapel, still huddled in my shawl
at my desk or scurrying as fast as discipline would wink at through the
windy passages. The heating arrangements, somehow, never succeeded in
coping with the extreme cold of a severe winter in the large rooms and
halls of the new wings, and I must confess that we were often most
miserably uncomfortable. I cannot but wonder what the pampered school
girls of the present generation in the same Convent would say to such
discomfort. But it did us no harm. Indeed, though I shiver at the
memory, I am sure it did us good. We came out the healthier and hardier
for it, much as the Englishman does from his cold house, the coldest in
the world. The old conditions of a hardier life, that either killed or
cured, did far more to make a vigorous people than all the new-fangled
eugenics ever can.
If I had little of the comfort of the Philadelphia child in the
Philadelphia house, I shared with him the outdoor pleasures which winter
provided by way of compensation--the country white under snow for weeks
and weeks, snowballs to be made and snow houses built, sliding to be
had on the frozen lake, and coasting down the long hill just beyond the
gate into the woods, when there were sleds to coast on. And what
excitement in the marvellous snow-storms that have vanished with other
marvels of my youth--the storms that put the new blizzard to shame, when
the snow drifts were mountains high, and it took all the men on the
farm, with Big John at their head, to clear a way through the near paths
and roads. I recall one storm in particular when my Father, who had been
making his periodical visit to my Sister and myself, left the Convent at
six, was snowed up in his train, and never reached the dingy Depot in
Frankford until three the next morning, and when for days we got out of
the house only for a solemn ten minutes' walk each noon on the wide
front porch, where it was a shocking breach of discipline to be seen at
all other times except on Thursday and Sunday, the Convent visiting
days. Of the inspiriting rigours of a Philadelphia winter I was never in
ignorance.
In the snow drifts and storms of winter Big John and his men were not
more helpless than in the floods and slush that began with the first
soft breath of the Philadelphia spring. Wearing our big shapeless
overshoes, we waded through the puddles and jumped over the streams in
the Convent paths and roads as, in town, Philadelphia children, with
their "gums" on, jumped over the streams and waded through the puddles
in the abominably paved streets. But then hope too began when the first
spaces of green were uncovered by the melting snow. The first
spring-beauty in the sunny spaces of the woods, the first flowery frost
in the orchard, the first blooming of the tulip trees, were among the
great events of the year. And what joy now in the new hunt!--what
treasure of spring-beauties everywhere in the woods as the sun grew
warmer, of shyer, retired hepaticas, of white violets running wild in
the swampy fields beyond the lake, of sweet trailing arbutus, of
Jacks-in-the-pulpit flourishing best in the damp thickets of the
Poisonous Valley into which I never wandered without a tremor not merely
because it was a forbidden adventure, but because, though I passed
through it unscathed, I had seen so often the horrible and unsightly red
rash one whiff from over its bushes and trees could bring out on the
faces and hands of my schoolmates with a skin more sensitive than mine.
Games lost their charm in the spring sunshine and our one pleasure was
in the hunt, no longer for chestnuts and walnuts and hickory nuts, but
solely for flowers, bringing back great bunches wilting in our hot
little hands, to place before the shrine that aroused the warmest
fervours of our devotion or was tended by the nun of our special
adoration.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE]
And before we knew it, the spring-beauties and hepaticas and white
violets and Jacks-in-the-pulpit disappeared from the woods, and the
flowery frost from the orchard, and the great blossoms from the tulip
trees, and summer was upon us--blazing summer when we lay perspiring on
our little beds up there in Gothic Hall where a few months before we
shivered and shook, perspiration streamed from our faces on our school
books at the study hour, more a burden than ever as we drooped and
drowsed in the heat;--blazing summer when the fragrance of the roses
hung heavy over Madame Huguet's garden and mingled with the too sweet
fragrance of the honeysuckle about the columns of the porch and over
every door;--blazing summer when all day long meadows and gardens and
lawns swooned under the pitiless sunshine and we, who had braved the
winter cold undismayed, never put as much as our noses out of doors
until the hour of sunset;--blazing summer when for many years I saw the
other girls going home, the gaiety of sea and mountain and change
awaiting them, while my Sister and I stayed on, desolate at heart
despite the efforts of the nuns to help us forget, feeling forlornly
forsaken as we watched the green burnt up into brown and the summer
flowers wilt and die, and the drought turn the roads to dust, and all
Nature parched as we parched with it. The holiday dragged terribly and,
reversing the usual order of things, I counted the days until school
would begin again. However, at least I can say that I saw the
Philadelphia summer in its full terrors as every Philadelphia child ever
born, for whom wealth or chance opens no gate of escape, must see it and
did see it of old.
And so for me in the Convent the seasons were the same as for the child
in Philadelphia and its suburbs. And I learnt how cold Philadelphia can
be, and how hot--if Penn, safe in England, was grateful for the greater
nearness of his town to the sun, not a Philadelphian on the spot,
sweltering through its midsummer heat, has ever yet shared his
gratitude. And I learnt how beautiful Philadelphia is as it grows mild
again after winter has done its worst, or as it cools off in the
friendlier autumn sun. And not to know these facts is not to know
Philadelphia.
IV
In the Convent regulation of daily life lay the unconquerable
difference. Philadelphia has its laws and traditions that guide the
Philadelphian through every hour and duty of the day, and the
Philadelphian, who from the cradle does not obey these traditions and
laws, can never be quite as other Philadelphians. The Sacred Heart is a
French order, and the nuns imported their laws and traditions from
France, qualified, modified, perhaps, on the way, but still with an
unmistakable foreign flavour and tendency that could not pass
unquestioned in a town where the first article of faith is that
everybody should do precisely what everybody else does.
I remember when the Rhodes scholars were first sent from America to
Oxford a friend of mine professed serious concern for the future of the
University should they introduce buckwheat cakes on Oxford breakfast
tables. And, really, he was not as funny as he thought. A man is a good
deal what his food makes him. The macaroni-fed Italian is not as the
sausage-and-sauerkraut-fed German, nor the Hindu who thrives on rice as
the Irishman bred upon potatoes. Never was a town more concerned with
the Question of Food than Philadelphia and I now see quite plainly that
I, beginning my day at the Convent on coffee and rolls, could not have
been as the correct Philadelphia child beginning the day in Philadelphia
or the suburbs on scrapple and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. Thus,
the line of separation was drawn while I was still in short skirts with
my hair cropped close.
The Convent day continued, as it began, with differences. I sat down at
noon to the substantial French breakfast which at the Convent, as a
partial concession to American ideals, became dinner. At half past
three, like a little French girl, I had my _gouter_, for which even the
French name was retained--how well I remember the big, napkin-lined
basket, full of hunks of good gingerbread, or big crackers, or sweet
rolls, passed round by Sister Duffy, probably the most generous of all
generous Irishwomen, who would have slipped an extra piece into every
little hand if she could, but who was so shockingly cross-eyed that we
got an idea of her as a disagreeable old thing, an ogress, always
watching to see if we took more than our appointed share. Quite recently
I argued it all out again with the few old Sisters left to greet me on
my first and only visit to the Convent during thirty years and, purely
for the sake of the sentiment of other days. I refused to believe them
when they insisted that Sister Duffy, who now lies at peace in the
little graveyard on the hillside in the woods, wasn't cross at all, but
as tender as any Sister who ever waited on hungry little girls! I would
have given a great deal could she have come back, cross-eyes and all,
with her big basket of gingerbread to make me feel at home again, as I
could not in the Visitors' dining-room where my _gouter_ was set out on
a neatly spread table, even though on one side of me was "Marie" of _Our
Convent Days_, my friend who had been Prince of Denmark in our
Booth-stricken period, and on the other Miss Repplier, the chronicler of
our childish adventures. It was the first time we three had sat there
together since more years than I am willing to count, and I think we
were too conscious that youth now was no longer of the company not to
feel the sadness as keenly as the pleasure of the reunion in our old
home.
_Gouter_, with its associations, has sent me wandering far from the
daily routine which ended, in the matter of meals, with a supper of meat
and potatoes and I hardly know what, at half past six, when little
Philadelphia girls were probably just finishing their cambric tea and
bread-and-butter, and even the buns from Dexter's when these had been
added as a special treat or reward. How could we, upon so much heavier
fare, have seen things, how could we have looked upon life, just as
those other little girls did?
V
We did not play, any more than we ate, like the child in Philadelphia or
its suburbs. One memory of our playtime I have common to all
Philadelphia children of my generation: the memory of Signor Blitz, on
a more than usually blissful Reverend Mother's Feast, taking rabbits out
of our hats and bowls of gold-fish out of his sleeve, and holding a long
conversation with the immortal Bobby, the most prodigious puppet that
ever conversed with any professional ventriloquist. But this was a rare
ecstasy never repeated.
[Illustration: MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN]
What games the children in Rittenhouse Square and the Lanes of
Germantown had, I cannot record, but of one thing I am sure: they did
not go to the tune and the words of "_Sur le pont d'Avignon_," or "_Qu'
est-ce qui passe ici si tard_," or "_Il etait un avocat_." Nor, I fancy,
were "_Malbrough s'en va-t'en guerre_" and "_Au clair de la lune, mon
ami Pierrot_," the songs heard in the Philadelphia nursery. Nor is it
likely that "_C'est le mois de Marie_," which we sang as lustily all
through May as the devout in France sing it in every church and every
cathedral from one end of their land to the other, was the canticle of
pious little Catholic children celebrating the month of Mary at St.
Joseph's or St. Patrick's. Nor outside the Convent could the Bishop on
his pastoral rounds have been welcomed with the "_Vive! Vive! Vive!
Monseigneur au Sacre Coeur, Quel Bonheur!_" which, the title
appropriately changed, was our form of welcome to every distinguished
visitor. And, singing these songs and canticles, how could the
associations and memories we were laying up for ourselves be the same as
those of Philadelphia children whose ears and voices were trained on
"Juanita" and "Listen to the Mocking Bird," or, it may be, "Marching
through Georgia" and "Way down upon the Swanee River"? These things may
make subtle distinctions, but they are distinctions that can never be
overcome or outgrown.
In study hours, as in playtime and at meals, we were seldom long out of
this French atmosphere. French class was only shorter than English. If
we were permitted to talk at breakfast, it was not at all that we might
amuse ourselves, but that we might practise our French which did not
amuse us in the least. Many of the nuns were French, often, it is true,
French from Louisiana or Canada, but their English was not one bit more
fluent on that account. Altogether, there was less of Philadelphia than
of France in the discipline, the devotions, and the relaxations of the
Convent.
VI
But, of all the differences, the most fundamental, I think, came from
the fact that the Convent was a Convent and taught us to accept the
conventual, the monastic interpretation of life. We were there in, not
only a French, but a cloistered atmosphere--the atmosphere that
Philadelphia least of all towns could understand. The Friends had
attained to peace and unworldliness by staying in their own homes and
fulfilling their duty as fathers and mothers of families, as men and
women of business. But the nuns saw no way to achieve this end except
by shutting themselves out of the world and avoiding its temptations.
The Ladies of the Sacred Heart are cloistered. They leave the Convent
grounds only to journey from one of their houses to another, for care is
taken that they do not, by staying over long in one school, form too
strong an attachment to place or person. Where would be the use of being
a nun if you were not made to understand the value of sacrifice? Their
pupils are, for the time, as strictly cloistered. Not for us were the
walks abroad by which most girls at boarding school keep up with the
times--or get ahead of them. We were as closely confined to the Convent
grounds as the nuns, except during the holidays or when a friend or
relation begged for us a special outing. It was not a confinement
depending on high stone walls and big gates with clanging iron chains
and bars. But the wood fences running with the board walk above the
railroad and about the woods and the fields and the gardens made us no
less prisoners--willing and happy prisoners as we might be, and were.
This gave us, or gave me at any rate, a curious idea of the Convent as a
place entirely apart, a place that had nothing to do with the near town
or the suburb in which it stood--a blessed oasis in the sad wilderness
of the world.
There is no question that, as a result, I felt myself in anticipation a
stranger in the wilderness into which I knew I must one day go from the
oasis, and in which I used to imagine I should be as much of an exile
as the Children of Israel in the desert. Of course I was not quite that
when the time came, but that for an interval I was convinced I must be
explains how unlike in atmosphere the Convent was to Eleventh and
Spruce.
In all sorts of little ways I was confirmed in this belief by life and
its duties at the Convent. For all that concerned me nearly, for all
that was essential to existence here below, Philadelphia seemed to me as
remote as Timbuctoo. I got insensibly to think of myself first not as a
Philadelphian, not as an American, but as a "Child of the Sacred
Heart,"--the first question under all circumstances was what I should
do, not as a Philadelphian, but as a Child of the Sacred Heart.
[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING]
I cannot say how much the mere name of the thing represented--the honour
and the privilege--and there was not a girl who had been for any time a
pupil who did not prize it as I did. And we were not given the chance to
forget or belittle it. We were impressed with the importance of showing
our appreciation of the distinction Providence had reserved for us--of
showing it not merely by our increased faith and devotion, but by our
bearing and conduct. We might be slack about our lessons. That was all
right at a period when slackness prevailed in girls' schools and it was
unfeminine, if not unladylike, to be too learned. But we were not let
off from the diligent cultivation of our manners. Our faith and devotion
were attended to in a daily half hour of religious instruction. But
Sunday was not too holy a day for the Politeness Class that was held
every week as surely as Sunday came round, in which we were taught all
the mysteries of a Deportment that might have given tips to the great
Turveydrop himself,--how to sit, how to walk, how to carry ourselves
under all circumstances, how to pick up a handkerchief a passer-by might
drop--an unspeakable martyrdom of a class when each unfortunate student,
in turn, went through her paces with the eyes of all the school upon her
and to the sound of the stifled giggles of the boldest. We never met one
of our mistresses in the corridors that we did not drop a laboured
curtsey--a shy, deplorably awkward curtsey when I met the Reverend
Mother, Mother Boudreau, a large, portly, dignified nun from Louisiana
and a model of deportment, who inspired me with a respectful fear I
never have had for any other mortal. We could not answer a plain "Yes"
or "No" to our mistresses, but the "Madam" must always politely follow.
"Remember" was a frequent warning, "remember that wherever, or with
whom, you may be, to behave like children of the Sacred Heart!" A Child
of the Sacred Heart, we were often told, should be known by her manners.
And so impressed were we with this precept that I remember a
half-witted, but harmless, elderly woman whom the nuns, in their
goodness, had kept on as a "parlour boarder" after her school days were
over, telling us solemnly that when she was in New York and went out
shopping with her sister, the young men behind the counter at Stewart's
would all look at her with admiring eyes and whisper to each other, "Is
it not easy to see that Miss C. is a Child of the Sacred Heart?"
[Illustration: THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION]
Seriously, the training did give something that nothing else could, and
an admirable training it was for which girls to-day might exchange more
than one brain-bewildering course at College and be none the worse for
it. In my own case, I admit, I should not mind having had more of the
other training, as it has turned out that my work in life is of the sort
where a quick intelligence counts for more than an elegant deportment.
But I can find no fault with the Convent for neglect. Girls then were
not educated to work. If you had asked any girl anywhere what was
woman's mission, she would have answered promptly--had she been
truthful--"to find a husband as soon as possible;" if she were a Convent
girl,--a Child of the Sacred Heart--she would have added, "or else to
become a nun." Her own struggles to fit herself for any other career the
inconsiderate Fates might drive her into, so far from doing her any
harm, were the healthiest and most bracing of tonics. Granted an average
mind, she could teach herself through necessity just the important
things school could not teach her through a routine she didn't see the
use of. She emerged from the ordeal not only heroically but
successfully, which was more to the point. A young graduate from Bryn
Mawr said to me some few days ago that when she looked at her mother and
the women of her mother's generation and realized all they had
accomplished without what is now called education, she wondered whether
the girls of her generation, who had the benefit of all the excess of
education going, would or could accomplish more, or as much. To tell the
truth, I wonder myself. But then it may be said that I, belonging to
that older generation, am naturally prejudiced.
VII
There are moments when, reflecting on all I lost as a Philadelphian, I
am half tempted to regret my long years of seclusion, busy about my soul
and my manners, at the Convent. A year or so would not have much
mattered one way or the other. I led, however, no other life save the
Convent life until I was seventeen. I knew no other standpoint save the
Convent standpoint.
But the temptation to regret flies as quickly as it comes. I loved the
life too well at the time, I love it too well in the retrospect, to have
wanted then, or to want now, to do without it. It was a happy life to
live, though I would not have been a school girl had I not, with the
school girl's joy in the morbid, liked nothing better than to pose as
the unhappiest of mortals--to be a school girl was to be misunderstood I
would have vowed, had I, in my safe oasis, ever heard the expression or
had the knowledge to guess at its meaning. I loved every stone in the
house, brown and ugly as every stone might be, I loved every tree in
the woods whether or no it dropped pleasant things to devour, I loved
every hour of the day whatever might be its task. I had a quick memory,
study was no great trouble to me, and I enjoyed every class and
recitation. I enjoyed getting into mischief--I wore once only the Ribbon
for Good Conduct--and I enjoyed being punished for it. In a word, I got
a good deal out of my life, if it was not exactly what a girl was sent
to school to get. And it is as happy a life to remember, with many
picturesque graces and absurdities, joys and sorrows, that an
uninterrupted existence at Eleventh and Spruce could not have given.
I have no desire to talk sentimental nonsense about my school days
having been my happiest. That sort of talk is usually twaddle. It was
not as school that I loved the Convent, though as school it had its
unrivalled attractions; it was as home. When the time came to go from it
I suffered that sharp pang felt by most girls on leaving home for
school. I remember how I, who affected a sublime scorn for the cry-baby,
blubbered like one myself when I was faced with the immediate prospect
of life in Philadelphia. How well I recall my despair--how vividly I see
the foolish scene I made in the empty Refectory, shadowy in the dusk of
the June evening, where I was rehearsing the valedictory of the
Graduating Class which I had been chosen to recite, and where, after the
first few lines I broke down to my shame, and sniffled and gurgled and
sobbed in the lap of the beloved mistress who was doing her best to
comfort me, and also to keep me from disgracing her, as I should have
done by any such scene on the great day itself.
If the Convent stands for so much in my memory, it would be ungrateful
to regret the years I spent in it. The sole reason would be my loss, not
as a student, but as a Philadelphian, for this loss was the price I
paid. But the older I grow, the better I realize that to the loss I owe
an immeasurable gain. For as a child I never got so accustomed to
Philadelphia as not to see it at all. The thing we know too well is
often the thing we see least clearly, or we should not need the
philosopher to remind us that that is best which nearest lieth. All
through my childhood and early youth I saw Philadelphia chiefly from the
outside, and so saw it with more awe and wonder and lasting delight than
those Philadelphians who, in childhood and early youth, saw it only from
the inside,--too near for it to come together into the picture that
tells.