What she really learned was, as with her mates, another matter—­for, of course, those devouringly active little minds did not spend six hours a day in school without learning something incessantly.  The few rags and tatters of book-information they acquired were but the merest fringes on the great garment of learning acquired by these public-school children, which was to wrap them about all their lives.  What they learned during those eight years of sitting still and not whispering had nothing to do with the books in their desks or the lore in their teachers’ brains.  The great impression stamped upon the wax of their minds, which became iron in after years, was democracy—­a crude, distorted, wavering image of democracy, like every image an ideal in this imperfect world, but in its essence a reflection of the ideal of their country.  No European could have conceived how literally it was true that the birth or wealth or social position of a child made no difference in the estimation of his mates.  There were no exceptions to the custom of considering the individual on his own merits.  These merits were often queerly enough imagined, a faculty for standing on his head redounding as much, or more, to a boy’s credit as the utmost brilliance in recitation, or generosity of temperament, but at least he was valued for something he himself could do, and not for any fortuitous incidents of birth and fortune.

Furthermore there lay back of these four hundred children, who shaped their world to this rough-and-ready imitation of democracy, their families, not so intimately known to each other, of course, as the children themselves, but still by no means unknown in their general characteristics; four hundred American families who were, on the whole, industrious, law-abiding, who loved their children, who were quite tasteless in matters of art, and quite sound though narrow in matters of morals, utterly mediocre in intelligence and information, with no breadth of outlook in any direction; but who somehow lived their lives and faced and conquered all the incredible vicissitudes of that Great Adventure, with an unconscious, cheerful fortitude which many an acuter mind might have envied them.

It is possible that the personal knowledge of these four hundred enduring family lives was, perhaps, the most important mental ballast taken on by the children of the community during their eight years’ cruise at school.  Certainly it was the most important for the sensitive, complicated, impressionable little Sylvia Marshall, with her latent distaste for whatever lacked distinction and external grace, and her passion for sophistication and elegance, which was to spring into such fierce life with the beginning of her adolescence.  She might renounce, as utterly as she pleased, the associates of her early youth, but the knowledge of their existence, the acquaintance with their deep humanity, the knowledge that they found life sweet and worth living, all this was to be a part of the tissue of her brain forever, and was to add one to the conflicting elements which battled within her for the mastery during all the clouded, stormy radiance of her youth.