“Oh, he means something else,” exclaimed Eugenia sadly. “Nothing as silly and sentimental as the love of an abandoned woman.”
“I don’t know if he means something else or not, but what I do know is thatyouhavedone the right thing in ceasing to wait around,” said the mother of the Man in the Wing Chair severely. “And now, tell me, Eugenia, do you know Italy?”
The librarian jumped at this. The woman, one couldn’t help noticing, seemed obsessed with having people know Italy. Miss Prim had nothing against Italy, a wonderful country in every way, but why the insistence? To her, there was something almost impolite about continually urging everyone to travel halfway across Europe.
“As I said to Prudencia the day I met her, in my view a woman’s education cannot be complete unless she has lived for a time in Italy. There’s a certain lack of polish to the minds of women who haven’t had that experience. It’s vital to the development of the female intellect.”
“Only female? What about men?” asked the librarian.
The old lady looked at her with a sardonic expression.
“Men? Men can take care of themselves. We’ve got enough to be getting on with, don’t you think? You’re very young and inexperienced, Prudencia, but let me tell you something: the day that most dinner parties in mixed company stop splitting into two camps—one male, where they discuss politics and economics, the other female, where gossip and chitchat dominate—is the day when we’ll have the authority to pronounce on men’s education. What I’m going to say now will undoubtedly shock you, but I will say it anyway: most women have no conversation. And the worst thing is, it’s not because they’re incapable of it, it’s because they don’t bother trying.”
The librarian exchanged a glance of resigned understanding with Miss Mott, who quickly changed the subject, saying that, in her opinion, the Ancient Greek and Roman classics were the cornerstone of any education, male or female.
“Would you mind if I asked you something about your son? Where did he complete his studies?” asked Miss Prim.
“I like to think that my son educated himself. Of course, we gave him all the tools, first-rate tools: wonderful schools, excellent teachers. But it’s to his credit that he made use of them as he did.”
“He’s a brilliant man,” said Miss Mott.
“He’s a brilliant man who’s wasted his talent,” declared the old lady bitterly as she stood up to leave. Miss Mott saw the two women to the garden gate and said good-bye with a smile.
The old lady and the librarian walked for some time, side by side, each deep in thought. Though Miss Prim was keen to ask more about her employer’s education, she didn’t dare draw her companion from her silence. It was the latter who resumed the conversation. She explained that Eugenia Mott’s husband had left her one morning without a word, three months before she moved to San Ireneo. Then she asked Miss Prim what she thought of the teacher.
“She seems like a good, simple woman, though not excessively bright. I’m surprised you selected her. I thought education was highly prized in San Ireneo.”
“You mean, you find her average?”
Prudencia looked at the old lady in dismay. How could such an elegant woman refer to others with so little tact or respect? However much she pondered, she could not understand it. She couldn’t get used to the coldness of the older woman’s remarks, her abrupt frankness, her habit of speaking, looking, and even listening with an air of incontrovertible authority.
“What I mean is that I was expecting someone... less simple. Is she well qualified, academically?” she asked, treading carefully.
“Absolutely not, she’s an ordinary teacher. Extremely ordinary.”
“But the education in the classics that the children here receive... not everyone is qualified to teach it.”
The old lady turned to her with a weary shrug.
“My dear Miss Prim, do you still not understand how things work here? Eugenia Mott is a simple, extremely simple teacher because what San Ireneo wants for its children is exactly that: a teacher without intellectual aspirations.”
“Forgive me for pressing you on this,” said Prudencia, puzzled, “but I can’t understand how a place where children performAntigonein Greek could want a schoolteacher with no intellectual aspirations.”
For the second time the old lady stopped and stared at her companion gravely.
“Because, in actual fact, they don’t need anyone to teach the children anything. Because it’s they who educate their children themselves, who teach them to recite poems by Ariosto before they can read; explain Euclidian geometry using theElementsas a textbook; play them a fragment of a Palestrina motet for them to guess which one it is. It’s they, my dear, who regularly cross half of Europe to sit their children before Fra Angelico’sNoli Me Tangere, show them the high altar of St. John Lateran, bring them face-to-face with the capital of the Temple of Aphrodite.”
“So why do they want a teacher at all?”
“To safeguard all that work, to preserve and protect it. In other words, to ensure it doesn’t get spoiled. Does that shock you? If they hired a teacher bursting with theories on education, sociology, child psychology, and all those other modern sciences, they’d be letting the fox into the henhouse. Look at it this way: if you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of the truth, would you let that world educate your children?”
“Now I understand why your son didn’t want someone with a degree for a librarian,” sighed Miss Prim.
The lady smiled at her sweetly.
“Ah, but he hired you, didn’t he? He must have seen something special in you, isn’t that so? Tell me, what do you think it was?”
Miss Prim said she didn’t know, though she suspected that it had something to do with the misunderstanding that had occurred on the day of her arrival at the house.
