" That was the way Mrs. Mason phrased it in her eloquent talks
to the girls.
The other teachers, especially the pale young professor of mental and
moral philosophy, referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the
new world. This was the "formative influence" of the school,--the
quality that the Institute prided itself on above all else.
It was of a poetic shade, composed in equal parts of art, literature,
and religion. Milly absorbed it at church, where the minister spoke
almost tearfully about "the mission of young womanhood to elevate the
ideals of the race," or more colloquially in Bible class as the duty of
"being a good influence" in life, especially men's lives. She got it
also in what books she read,--especially in Tennyson and in every novel,
as well as in the few plays she saw. There it was embodied as Woman of
Romance,--sublime, divine, mysterious, with a heavenly mission to
reform, ennoble, uplift--men, of course,--in a word to make over the
world. The idea of it had come down from the darkness of the middle
ages,--that smelly and benighted period,--had inflamed all romance, and
was now spreading its last miasmatic touch over the close of the
nineteenth century. All this, to be sure, Milly never knew.
She merely began to feel self-conscious, as a member of her sex,--a
being apart from men and somehow superior to them, without the same
appetites and low ideals, and with her own peculiar and sacred function
to perform for humanity.
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