me of the
characteristics of Herndon Hall, though fortunately fewer than there
were when Adelle got her education. But even at that time there were
many excellent schools for girls where the teachers made sincere efforts
to teach the girls something, where the girls were human and well-bred,
and the teachers were kind and sympathetic and would not have tolerated
such conduct as went on almost openly in this "exclusive" establishment,
nor such brutal treatment as the girls dealt out to Adelle.

Herndon Hall, with its utterly false standards of everything that
concerns woman's being, was the fruit of those ideals that have obtained
about women, their position and education, for many centuries. And
Herndon Hall was Adelle's accident--the fate to which the trust officers
in all good will consigned her. There always is and must be, even in our
own enlightened age of feminist movements, a Herndon Hall--perhaps more
than one. Parents who believe that marriage and "a suitable position in
society" are all there is in life for a woman will always create Herndon
Halls.

XII

If the history of Clark's Field and those whom it concerned were an
idealistic or romantic story, striving to present the world as it ought
to be rather than as it often happens to be, our little heroine should
at this crisis awaken from her apathy. Her spark of a soul should be
touched by some sympathetic agent,--one of the teachers who had lived
sadly and deeply, or some generous exception among her school-fellows,
who would extend a protecting wing to the persecuted girl. No doubt even
in Herndon Hall there were such who might have answered at a pinch to
regenerate Adelle and start her forth on a series of physical if not
spiritual adventures that would be exhilarating to the reader. But
nothing of the sort came into her life at this period. She was too
unpromising to arouse the incipient Samaritans.

There was, of course, the religious or rather the church side of the
school in which Adelle might have taken refuge. This consisted of
attending the small Episcopal Church in the neighboring village, where
the excellent rector, a married man and the father of daughters, often
directed his discourses at the Hall pews. But Adelle was no more
religiously minded than her worldly little associates. There was nothing
in the service of ritualistic beauty to arouse a latent
sensuousness--nothing of color or form or sound. Religion in fact had
even less to