This time, Alma only thought the word (“But—”); however, she must have thought it too loudly, because somehow her mother heard it. Now Beatrix had been pushed entirely too far.
“I am sorry on your own account, Alma Whittaker, that you are so selfish in your regard for others,” Beatrix said, her face clenched now with true anger. As for her final two words, she spat them out like two sharp chips of ice:
“Improve yourself.”
But Prudence also needed improvement, and a good deal of it, too!
To begin with, she was quite far behind Alma in matters of schooling. To be fair, though, what child would not have been behind Alma? By the age of nine, Alma could comfortably read Caesar’s Commentaries in its original, and Cornelius Nepos. She could already defend Theophrastus over Pliny. (One was the true scholar of natural science, she would argue, while the other was a mere copyist.) Her Greek, which she loved and recognized as a sort of delirious form of mathematics, was growing stronger by the day.
Prudence, by contrast, knew her letters and her numbers. She had a sweet and musical voice, but her speech itself—the very blazing emblem of her unfortunate background—needed much correction. During the beginning of Prudence’s stay at White Acre, Beatrix picked at bits of the girl’s language constantly, as though with the sharpened tip of a knitting needle, digging away at usage that sounded common or base. Alma was encouraged to make corrections, as well. Beatrix instructed Prudence that she must never say “back and forth,” when “backwards and forwards” was so much more refined. The word fancy in any context sounded crude, as did the word folks. When one wrote a letter at White Acre, it went in the post, not the mail. A person did not fall sick; a person fell ill. One would not be leaving for church soon; one would be leaving for church directly. One was not partly there; one was nearly there. One did not stove along; one hurried along. And one did not talk in this family; one conversed.
A weaker child might have given up on speaking altogether. A more combative child might have demanded to know why Henry Whittaker was allowed to talk like a blasted stevedore—why he could sit at the dinner table and call another man “a prick-fed donkey” straight to his face, without ever once being corrected by Beatrix—while the rest of the family must converse like barristers. But Prudence was neither weak nor combative. Instead, she turned out to be a creature of steadfast and unblinking vigilance, who perfected herself daily as though honing the blade of her soul, taking care never to make the same error twice. After five months at White Acre, Prudence’s speech never again needed refinement. Not even Alma could find an error, though she never stopped looking for one. Other aspects of Prudence’s form—her posture, her manners, her daily toilet—also came into quick calibration.
Prudence took all corrections without complaint. Indeed, she actually sought corrections—particularly from Beatrix! Whenever Prudence neglected to perform a task properly, or indulged in an ungenerous thought, or made an ill-considered remark, she would personally report herself to Beatrix, admit her wrongs, and willingly submit to a lecture. In this manner, Prudence made Beatrix not merely her mother, but also her mother-confessor. Alma, who had been hiding her own faults and lying about her own shortcomings since toddlerhood, found this behavior monstrously incomprehensible.
As a result, Alma regarded Prudence with ever-increasing suspicion. There was a diamond-hard quality about Prudence, which Alma believed masked something wicked and perhaps even evil. The girl struck her as cagey and canny. Prudence had a way of sidling out of rooms, never seeming to turn her back on anyone, never making a noise when a door closed behind her. Also, Prudence was altogether too attentive to other people, never forgetting dates that were important to others, always taking care to wish the maids a happy birthday or a pleasant Sabbath at the appropriate time, and all that sort of business. This diligent pursuit of goodness felt altogether too unremitting to Alma, as did the stoicism.
What Alma did know without question was that it advantaged her little to be held by comparison against such a perfectly lacquered person as Prudence. Henry even called Prudence “Our Little Exquisite,” which made Alma’s old nickname “Plum” feel humble and plain. Everything about Prudence made Alma feel humble and plain.
But there were consolations. In the classroom, at least, Alma always held place of primacy. Prudence could never catch up with her sister there. It was not for lack of effort, either, for the girl was certainly a hard worker. Poor thing, she labored over her books like a Basque stonemason. Each book for Prudence was like a slab of granite, to be hauled uphill in the sun with panting effort. It was nearly painful to watch, but Prudence insisted on persevering, and never once broke into tears. As a result, she did advance—and impressively, one must admit, considering her background. Mathematics would always be a struggle for her, but she did cudgel into her brains the fundamentals of Latin, and after a time she could speak quite passable French, with a nice accent. As for penmanship, Prudence did not cease practicing until it was every bit as fine as a duchess’s.
But all the discipline in the world is not enough to close a real gap in the realm of scholarship, and Alma had gifts of the mind that extended far beyond what Prudence would ever be able to reach. Alma had a capital memory for words and an innate brilliance for sums. She loved drills, tests, formulas, theorems. For Alma, to read something once was to have ownership of it forever. She could take apart an argument the way a good soldier can dismantle his rifle—half asleep in the dark, and the thing still comes to pieces beautifully. Calculus put her into fits of ecstasies. Grammar was an old friend—perhaps from having grown up speaking so many languages simultaneously. She also loved her microscope, which felt like a magical extension of her own right eye, enabling her to peer straight down the throat of the Creator Himself.
For all these reasons, one might have supposed that the tutor whom Beatrix eventually hired for the girls would have preferred Alma to Prudence, but in fact he did not. In fact, he was careful not to make known any preference between the two children—both of whom he seemed to regard as a flat and equal duty. The tutor was a rather dull young man, British by birth, with a poxy, waxen complexion and an ever-worried countenance. He sighed a great deal. His name was Arthur Dixon, and he was a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh. Beatrix had selected him after a rigorous examination process involving dozens of other candidates, all of whom had been rejected for—among other faults—being too stupid, too talkative, too religious, not religious enough, too radical, too handsome, too fat, or too stuttering.
For the first year of Arthur Dixon’s tenure, Beatrix often sat in the classroom, too, working at her mending in the corner, watching to ensure that Arthur did not make factual errors, or treat the girls in any sort of unbefitting manner. Eventually she was satisfied: young Dixon was a perfectly boring wizard of academics, who did not appear to be in possession of a single callow or jocular bone. He could be utterly trusted, then, to teach the Whittaker girls, four days a week, a rotating coursework of natural philosophy, Latin, French, Greek, chemistry, astronomy, mineralogy, botany, and history. Alma was also given special extra work in optics, algebra, and spherical geometry, from which Prudence—in a rare gesture of mercy on Beatrix’s part—was spared.