"
She laughed.
"Are you thinking of my old boast? Yes; I have learnt something, though
hardly what I expected, and not quite so much. In the first place, I have
learnt that one of my ancestors must have been a very great fool; for they
say nothing comes out in a man but one of his forefathers possessed it
before him. In the second place, I have discovered that of all cursed
places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few
grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are
called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are.
They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they
cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the
question, 'Into how little space a human soul can be crushed?' I have seen
some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble,
and found room to move there--wide room. A woman who has been for many
years in one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she
dies, though she may expand a little afterward, when she breathes in the
free world."
"Were you miserable?" he asked, looking at her with quick anxiety.
"I?--no. I am never miserable and never happy. I wish I were. But I
should have run away from the place on the fourth day, and hired myself to
the first Boer-woman whose farm I came to, to make fire under her soap-pot,
if I had to live as the rest of the drove did.
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