Four Girls at Chautauqua | Page 3

on the collars and cuffs were carefully washed and
rinsed, and presently Marion, with her hands only a trifle pinker for the
operation, was ready to lean against a chair and discuss ways and
means. Her long apprenticeship in school-rooms had given her the
habit of standing instead of sitting, even when there was no occasion
for the former.
If these four young ladies had been creatures of the brain, gotten up
expressly for the purpose of illustrating extremes of character, instead
of being flesh and blood creations, I doubt whether they could have
better illustrated the different types of young ladyhood. There was Ruth
Erskine, dwelling in solitary grandeur in her royal home, as American
royalty goes, the sole daughter, the sole child indeed of the house, a girl
who had no idea of life except as a place in which to have a serenely
good time, and teach everybody to do as she desired them to. Money
was a commonplace matter-of-course article, neither to be particularly
prized nor despised; it was convenient, of course, and must be an
annoyance when one had to do without it; but of that, by practical
experience, she knew nothing. Yet Ruth was by no means a
"pink-and-white" girl without character; on the contrary, she had plenty
of character, but hitherto it had been frittered away on nothings, until it
looked as much like nothing as it could. She was the sort of person
whom education and circumstances of the right sort would have
developed into splendor, but the development had not taken place. Now
you are not to suppose that she was uneducated; that would be a libel
on Madame La Fonte and her fashionable seminary. She had graduated

with honor; taken the first prizes in everything. She knew all about
seminaries; so do I; and if you do, you are ready to admit that the
development had not come. There is constantly occurring something to
take back. While I write I have in mind an institution where the earnest
desire sought after and prayed for is the higher development, not alone
of the intellect, but of the heart: where the wonderful woman who is at
its head said to me a few years ago:
"If a lady has spent three years under my care, and graduated, and gone
out from me not a Christian, I feel like going down on my knees in
bitterness of soul, and crying, 'Lord, I have failed in the trust thou didst
give me." But the very fact that the word "wonderful" fits that woman's
name is proof enough that such institutions as hers are rare, and it was
not at that seminary that Ruth Erskine graduated. She was spending her
life in elegant pursuits that meant nothing, those of them which did not
mean worse than nothing, and the only difference between her and a
hundred others around her was that she knew perfectly well that they
all amounted to nothing, and didn't hesitate to say so, therefore she
earned the title of "queer." At the same time she did not hesitate to lead
the whirl around this continuous nothing, therefore she occupied that
perilous position of being liked and admired and envied, all in one.
Very few people loved her, and queerly enough she knew that too, and
instead of resenting it realized that she could not see why they should.
She was, moreover, remarkably careful as to her leading after all, and
those who followed were sure of being led in an eminently respectable
and fashionable way. Her most intimate friend was Eurie Mitchell,
which was not strange when one considered what remarkable opposites
in character they were. Eureka J. Mitchell was the respectable sounding
name that the young lady bore, but the full name would have sounded
utterly strange to her ears, the wild little word "Eurie" seeming to have
been made on purpose for her. She was the eldest daughter of a large,
good-natured, hard-working, much-bewildered family. They never
knew just where they belonged. They went to the First Church, which
for itself should have settled their position, since it was the opinion of
most of its members that it was organized especially that the "first
families" might have a church-home. But they occupied a very front
seat, by reason of their inability to pay for a middle one, which was bad

for "position," as First Church gentility went. What was surprising to
them was how they ever happened to have the money to pay for that
seat; but, let me record it to their honor, they always happened to have
it. They were honest. They ought to have been called "the happen
family," by reason of their inability to tell how much or how little they
might happen to have to live