He sought instead to counterbalance it through carefully casual remarks regarding the genuine worth of this man or that one, to place in Mimi’s hands, or where she would surely come upon them, articles, newspapers, books which would fill her mind with beauty and truth. Once it was an excellent translation of the short stories of Balzac. Another time it was The Way of All Flesh . Or a Thomas Hardy novel, though he kept from her Tess —that, he felt, was too—well, a little too advanced for one of Mimi’s tender years. He did not know that before they had left New Orleans Mimi had spent many hours locked in her own room while she surreptitiously devoured (almost literally, her nose was so close to the pages) the tragedy of Tess. Nor did he know she had read every one of the morocco-bound volumes of Maupassant he had so carefully placed on the topmost shelf. Now Mimi read (or reread) the volumes he gave her, she listened to his long talks and she answered the questions he at the most unlikely moments would ask her about her reading, for she knew it would have given him pain had she not done so.
And Jean’s strategy was not wholly a failure. It gave Mimi a sense of almost malicious delight when she found in classrooms that she was more or less familiar with a sonnet of Shakespeare, that she knew who Chaucer was, that Tennyson was something more than the shadowy figure of a man who had “written poetry or painted pictures or something.” Only with Hilda did she refrain from stressing, ever so gently, the advantages she possessed in having chosen a father like Jean. With Hilda she shared the stories that gave her pleasure, with Jean’s permission she loaned Hilda books and therein was built another link between them. …
To the trumpet-heralded tune of the martial “God of our fathers, whose almighty hand … ,” Mimi and Hilda, clad in white, filmy dresses identical of material and design with thirty others, marched forth one sunshiny June morning when the new century had reached its eleventh year. In their hands were clutched rolls of paper, each tied with a bow of