noise, Jessica Baylis wrote in her diary. Prettiness, the headmistress liked to say, has value only because of the pleasure it gives. And happiness has nothing to do with the pursuit of pleasure but with sacrifice of self and loyalty to high ideals. “Miss Hillard talked to us as she alone can, and as no one ever forgets,” wrote another girl in The Lantern in 1911.
That year the headmistress described in a letter to Theodate a morning, in which her pride in the school was palpable on the page. Before eight o’clock two girls were playing “the handle rolls of a Beethoven trio” in the gymnasium, as they did every day, she wrote. Others were polishing their shoes and tying black ribbons under their white collars in their tidied bedrooms, or reading in the library, or studying in the schoolroom, or crocheting in Red Hall. When the eight o’clock bell rang, “they all came streaming to prayers, to lift their clear young voices in the heavenly notes that fill our chapel and rise on high morning by morning,” she wrote. She felt warmth toward the young girls in her care and admired their “loveliness, spontaneity, and steadiness.” As she aged, “the solemnity [went] out of her face and in its place [was] a tenderness which often assumed a look of motherliness,” her young minister friend, John Dallas, observed. Eliza Talbott remembered that “she seemed to enfold us in a caring that was the real heart of our Westover experience.”
It was not always that way. Among “the triumvirate” that ran Westover—Mary Hillard, Lucy Pratt, and Helen LaMonte—it was Helen LaMonte who was called the balance wheel. A small, erect, slender person, she looked fragile but actually emanated force. When Miss Hillard flew off on tangents, it was she who gave her old friend a steadying hand. With her gentle and delicious sense of humor, Miss LaMonte would quietly calm everyone down with “bits of humor and wisdom scattered about,” a pupil remembered. One time the headmistress chose a few girls with flyaway curls for a club for those with fuzzy hair; she decided that its involuntary members would have to recite aloud Kipling’s poem “Fuzzy Wuzzy” as a form of penance. After Miss LaMonte heard about this, she told the girls to disband “because she had just returned from the Fiji Islands and feels quite at home among our ‘fuzzy heads,’” as one of the editors of The Lantern explained in the autumn of 1921. In her great enthusiasm and eagerness for adventure, the teacher had gone with a former student to the South Pacific, where they made sure to visit the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson. They had left New York on an old British India cargo freighter, “Lake of the Flowers,” with a few other passengers, including a screen writer and a man from Australia along with his performing dogs. There were “long days of good books and invented games and sleepy long, long thoughts,” remembered the former Betty Choate.
As assistant headmistress, Miss LaMonte did the administrative work she disliked in her small office to the right of the front door in Miss Hillard’s absence. Like other teachers at Westover, she, a Smith graduate, was among the first generation of graduates of most women’s colleges. Hired prior to 1900 at St. Margaret’s School, she was a widely read intellectual who loved to teach. In the classroom, Miss LaMonte’s method was one of “enticement” into the fascinating world of ideas. Her “attitude was that we were her equals come together for instruction and enjoyment, [and] it would be a breach of manners to behave ill in her class. Still, it did sometimes happen, if the playing fields were being mowed or the apple trees [were] in blossom, that someone was inattentive. This girl was asked quietly to depart and told she might wait in the corridor.” When necessary she pointed out errors with gentle humor and exquisite restraint. “What I remember most about Miss LaMonte was her way of expressing the necessary thing without being harsh or causing humiliation,” observed a graduate.
Dark-haired with a long nose and a penetrating look, she had very definite opinions. It was said that she had once marched down Fifth Avenue in a suffragette parade. She seemed to embody the highest ethics, indicating a slight air of scorn for what she regarded as inferior. Outspoken in a quiet way, she told girls, “when in doubt—don’t,” and urged them to be unafraid. With her twinkling eyes and wry smile, she drew to her those who were homesick, needed advice, or wanted permissions. She allowed a girl to use her office for a visit with a beau when the visiting rooms were taken, and at another time let her go to a Yale football game with him without a chaperone because his father was a well-known minister. “We opened our hearts to Miss LaMonte and adored to be near her. We could tell her our secrets and little problems, and she would always make us feel comfortable and happy. She radiated warmth and understanding and would always greet us with a smile and a word that made us feel adequate and at ease. She gave us a feeling of security and of being worthwhile,” recalled an early graduate. “And most of the time we were her heroines,” remembered Betty Choate Spykman. Miss LaMonte never thought girls did anything wrong, “and if we had a real success, whatever it might be, she rolled her eyes and clasped her hands in rapture.”
After her school had opened, Mary Hillard took more time for her private life. In fact, it was necessary for her to withdraw from time to time. It was on a Sunday in August of 1907 that she first met New York art connoisseur Augustus Jaccaci at Hill-Stead, when he was working on a book about private art collections. Mary described him in a letter to her sister, Emily, as “an Italian of aristocratic birth … very cosmopolitan, very brilliant, and with a rare simplicity and sweetness of nature which makes him one of the most delightful companions.” She soon asked him to make five hundred editions of Westover’s first catalog with gilt edges and a silk-lined slip jacket. She and the darkly handsome European she came to call “Jac” became dear friends. After he returned from a trip to Europe, she wrote him that “New York is a better place when you are in it,” and she sent him a share of stock in the Westover Corporation as thanks for his work. On her visits to New York during 1909 and 1910, they often dined and went to the theater together. “Our beloved (though sometimes misguided) principal returned from New York Saturday morning in excellent health and spirits,” observed Lucy Pratt. “She had been to concerts to her heart’s content by night and by day she had done more things than my pen knows how to write.”
Mary Hillard’s more than thirty surviving letters to Jaccaci have all the warmth, informality, and intimacy as those to her closest relatives and friends. “Dear Jac, you were such a deep comfort to me last night,” she wrote in one of them, saying how much she needed his friendship. Their closeness is indicated by her revelation of an important secret to him. “It was wonderful I could tell you what I did last night. You would know it is something I can hardly speak of—never do speak of—but I wanted to tell you Jac. For I want everything that makes you and me closer to each other. We each can help the other, we both need help. We are both generous, and generous people have especially human sympathy and affection, for they give out so much. Dear Jac, I’m so grateful to you, and I’m so grateful for what you were and meant to me last night.”
In the summer of 1910 she wrote to him in the most intimate manner, revealing that she enjoyed his manliness and felt he appreciated her womanliness. Writing from a vacation cottage in the woods, she alluded to the demands of what she called her “big ‘job,’” and asked him to imagine “what, under those circumstances, the brilliancy and cultivation of your mental powers is to me—the joy of having that in a companionship!” After he referred to her as “Mother Mary,” she rhapsodized that “you read my heart.” She went on: “You need me and I am here, and motherliness is measureless. You may be what you will—glad, grave, weary, troubled—It is all the same. It makes no dif-ference to the great deep understanding that knows you and cares. No one else could understand. But we do. We are both so simple. We both need companionship, comfort, healing, in this pathway of life which is so hard for each … you need the tenderness and the cherishing that wells in a woman’s heart. And I need the strength and courage that lives in high manhood.”
A few months later, in early January of 1911, when the man she had called her truest of friends suggested bringing visitors to Westover on a Sunday, she charmingly turned him away. “What a nice party you suggest! And how inhospitable not to say ‘Do come.’ But—dear Jac—the work we have to do here is something tremendous. It calls for all one’s wisdom to know how strength and vitality and powers of the mind can be so safeguarded as to
