recital. Last year they sang a program of motets by Palestrina and Bach. My dear, it was most interesting!”
Mrs. Loamford nodded enthusiastically.
“This sounds most encouraging,“ she remarked. “Girls today spend too much time in gadding about. Dorothy is a sensible girl, but there’s no use letting her have nothing to do with her time. I suppose the girls go to concerts in a body?”
“Oh, indeed yes! And one of our teachers always goes with them. We may be a little old-fashioned, but we do not think it right for girls to go about unchaperoned—even among themselves—at night in a public place.”
An office attendant spread before Dorothy and Mrs. Loamford a pile of blank forms on which were to be indicated the prospective student’s experience, age, place of birth, father’s business or profession, birthplace of parents, education, foreign languages spoken or read fluently, and religious preferences.
“You will understand,” explained the official, “why we must have this last space on our cards. It’s merely a precaution—although with you, Mrs. Loamford, it’s a mere formality.”
In the weeks preceding the official opening of St. Cecilia’s, Dorothy noted a change in her mother’s attitude toward her. She had observed something unusual for the first time when, on a shopping expedition, Mrs. Loamford had hurried her ostentatiously by a storewindow in which there was a placard announcing reductions in maternity dresses. When Dorothy sat beside a prospective mother in a street-car, Mrs. Loamford became nervous and suggested that they walk home—it would do them both good—and when Dorothy demurred,
she left the car anyhow and took a taxi. There always seemed to be something left unsaid in her mother’s
[54]
