Chapter III

Julia returned to the boarding school, and in spite of the weak efforts of her father to avert the fashionable fate that awaited her, she continued there for nearly two years. In music and painting she made rapid progress; but in literature and science she failed to make even a decent proficiency.

She was an altered creature. She was vain, affected, romantic, and transcendental, cherishing all sorts of visionary notions about life, and especially about lovers and husbands, who filled a long space in her daily meditations. She had lost her domestic nature, and that was the saddest loss of all. Her heart was not actually corrupted; but it was so buried up in the weeds of vanity and folly, that its gentle influence was almost entirely lost upon her life and character. If not unsexed, she had lost that hold upon woman’s sphere which confers her chief charm in society. She was a creature for the ball room and the opera, and not for the quiet shades of home.

Perhaps a boarding school does not always make such sad havoc in the mind and heart of the young female; but such is the tendency of its artificial manner of existence. Monastic discipline spoils woman; it removes her from, and unfits her for, her social, domestic position.

When the two years had nearly expired, Mr. Mason one day received a letter from the principal of the seminary, containing the astounding intelligence that Julia had eloped with a young gentleman who had come from the city on a visit in the neighborhood.

“The grand finale of the drama,” said Mr. Mason, throwing the letter to his wife.

“Good Heaven! who is this Mr. Winchel?” exclaimed Mrs. Mason, when she had read the letter.

“A son of Winchel, the merchant in —— Street.”

“Rich?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God it is no worse!” replied Mrs. Mason, so far relieved that a pleasant smile played upon her lips.

A few days after, Julia and her husband presented themselves at the home of her father. They were received with open arms. Mrs. Mason was too much pleased with the match to make a fuss about it, and Mr. Mason followed his wife’s “lead.”

A few weeks after, they were comfortably settled in a pleasant house; for Mr. Winchel, who had some very clearly defined aspirations for the quiet joys of a fireside of his own, insisted upon going to housekeeping instead of boarding.

This kind of life was novel to Julia, and for the first six months, while her husband consented to take her every evening to the opera, a ball, party, or concert, she was tolerably contented.

But Mr. Winchel got sick of such an incessant round of amusement, and sighed for that paradise of home which his imagination had years ago painted. He reasoned with his giddy wife; but she hated home, and reproached him for attempting to imprison her in the house, and thus make her life miserable.

Mr. Winchel was firm, and positively refused to go to any more operas, balls, parties, or concerts.

Julia was forced to accede to his reasonable desires; but home, even in the presence of her husband, had become an intolerable place. Indeed, the romance of a husband had worn itself away. He had fallen in love with her in the most natural way in the world, and had proposed to wait upon her father, and arrange the preliminaries for their marriage; but Julia was not content to be united to him in such a tame manner as that, and insisted upon an elopement. Her lover gratified her—to his sorrow, he now discovered.

Julia was unhappy. Her husband, disgusted at her folly, returned to the club he had abandoned when he married her, leaving her to comfort or amuse herself as best she might. And she found comfort and amusement in the society of a gay and dashing Lothario, who consoled her for her husband’s absence by making love to her. It was not long before the world was again astonished by the publication of an elopement—not a harmless, sentimental affair, but a criminal elopement.

Julia was too romantic to consider the moral turpitude of the act. The pious preaching and praying of the boarding school, had been lost upon her in the variety of more congenial topics that were there presented to her. The elopement was romance; she thought not of the crime.

Mr. Mason and his wife were in the deepest distress. Mr. Winchel called at her father’s store, and stated the particulars of their domestic experience. It was plain to both that the distaste for home was traceable to the loss of the domestic element of the misguided wife.

Julia and her seducer—we wrong him—both were guilty—were heard from in New Orleans; but the villain soon became tired of her whims, and left her, and she died a few years later, a ruined, abandoned, off-cast creature, the victim of a false education.

Mr. Mason’s remaining daughters were not sent to the boarding school. They received the best education to be had in the city, and there are noted institutions of learning there. They were thus kept constantly under the watchful care of their parents, and the domestic element in their natures was not unsettled by absence from home, while the plastic mind was being moulded into its shape for life.