here. This is such a happy place. Everyone is so happy. I love the work here.’) I have seen clearly that our hope lies in our quiet winters. Spring and Fall our friends come in great companies. We love to have them; we welcome them. Our safety lies in absolutely quiet Sundays, and in this blessedly quiet winter term. I have no right ever to go against my judgement in these things. You understand fully. So tempting as your attractive party is I know I am doing my bounden duty to Westover in asking you to wait over the Spring term. I shall love to have you all come up some day in May [if] you care to.”
She continued: “And as guests must be at times excluded from the home, so that these beautiful, living vital influences of the home may have freedom to gather and express themselves, just as flame springs from the log, and transforms the grey cold fireplace into a source of light and warmth, so the same conditions must be maintained in the life of such a kind of school as this is, that here may be that mysterious warmth and light and intimacy that comes in separation from the outer world, when the vitality within us, not taxed with social demands, may turn to the intimate daily life and the joy of that fellowship. That is what this beautiful snowbound winter term is to us. We protect it. Should we not? Even if it sometimes, as now, [it] becomes suddenly difficult to do so because one would rather not?”
After so firmly putting the mood of her beloved school above their relationship, either her letters to him ended or he no longer saved them. She continued to turn to him at times, to make memorial books for John Whittemore and Alfred Pope, for instance. After war broke out in Europe, Jaccaci returned to Paris, where he helped French and Flemish refugees. In the winter of 1915 he wrote to her with thanks for getting “the whole of Westover” involved in his cause, for which the King of Belgium later honored him. After the armistice he returned to Middlebury one more time, in 1919, when he signed the handsome leather-and-gilt school guest register he had designed many years before.
Mary had confided to “dear Jac” about her difficulties with Theodate, a member of the school’s board of trustees, who, she wrote, seemed “troubled and tremulous at the slightest suggestion of anything connected with Westover.” After the school had opened, tensions had arisen between the two strong-willed women. “Genius, and she has it, needs the kind of love somewhere that childhood needs. I give it to Theo very imperfectly because I think of myself too much (partly because the demands of daily life attack one so fiercely),” Mary wrote to him after Theo had sailed to Europe without saying goodbye. Photographs of Westover were included in an exhibit of the Architectural League of New York in 1910, and Cass Gilbert, president of the American Institute of Architects, later praised the structure as more “beautifully” designed than any girls’ school in the country. The two came up with the idea of giving her a gold medal inscribed “Theodate Pope, architect, 1910” in a leather case to help “dissolve that intangible something—we do not know what—that has seemed to send a frost through her thoughts of me.” (Theodate would finally be elected to the American Institute of Architects in 1918 and licensed to practice architecture in Connecticut in 1933.)
Problems had arisen between the two friends, because Theodate Pope would unexpectedly descend on Middlebury with a group of people to show them “her” school and receive a cool reception from Mary, who was fiercely protective of the school routine. “I think this attitude of not welcoming guests at all and every time hurts my dear Theo. I am placed in a dreadfully hard situation. But Westover does not exist as a monument to her genius, any more than it exists as an excuse for social pleasure for me. It belongs to its pupils. It was built for that. It is theirs,” she wrote to Jaccaci. It is for this reason that Mary established a surprise holiday when Theo was gladly welcomed back. In 1911, the year when Alfred Pope became president of the board, Theodate’s Holiday was announced by his daughter herself at breakfast on the last day of May. Despite tensions between the two women, Mary defended her former pupil and old friend whenever she ruffled feathers, as she frequently did. In a letter to Theo’s old beau, Harris Whittemore, she described a moment when “Theo took my hand most intimately, looked straight into my eyes and said, ‘You are my old Mary, are not you. Yes, you are my old real friend’ with entire trust. You will understand, with me, why we must all stand by her.”
In the spring of 1915, Theodate impulsively sailed to England on the luxurious Lusitania for a meeting of the Psychical Research Society in London, despite warnings about German submarines. After it was reported that the passenger ship had been torpedoed and quickly gone down, Mary rushed to Mrs. Pope’s side in New York as they anxiously awaited word of Theo’s fate. As Theo clung to an oar and thought she was going to drown, she counted the buildings she had designed, she later wrote to her mother. After hours in the ocean, she was pulled out and left for dead before someone noticed her eyelids flickering. Almost a year to the day after her rescue, Theodate’s Holiday had to be renamed Mrs. Riddle’s Holiday, after suddenly, at the age of forty-nine, she married John W. Riddle, a tall, thin American diplomat with a large handlebar mustache. Mary slyly suggested in a letter to a sister that it was fortunate that Mr. Riddle had a lot of diplomatic experience. Still, Theo’s former teacher was one of the few guests invited to the small wedding in Farmington, where the bride wore pale blue and carried a silver-tipped walking stick. She soon fulfilled her girlhood dream about raising orphaned children in the country.
While Theo was trying to adjust to married life, Mary was attempting to perfect her community of girls and women. She was well aware that in any group a hierarchy develops, particularly among young girls. Some liked each other too little, the headmistress thought, and others liked each other too much. Pupils were often warned about the problems. In the May 1920 issue of The Lantern, an editor cautioned classmates about finding fault with each other. “We are terribly critical here, of each other, and we have no right to be. If anyone outside of the school asked you what the girls of Westover were like, you’d have the nicest things possible to say, and they’d be perfectly true. Why, then, when we’re here together do we let criticism play so large a part in conversation?” The following year the December issue addressed the problem of exclusionary cliques. “It is always natural that one should see more of certain people than of others … But does no one feel that at times we let ourselves become so intimate with a certain group of girls, that we lose entire sight of many others? … The result proves to be that we are often, perhaps unconsciously, hard, hasty, and unkind.”
Miss Hillard discouraged cliquishness by encouraging girls to follow their interests in school publications and in dramatic, language, and other clubs. “She wanted everyone to be friends with everyone else,” a pupil recalled. When a group of ten or so girls formed a secret society in the 1920s, they knew that if the headmistress found out, she would be furious and forbid it. It was also assumed that she would look unkindly on requests to change roommates. The influence of cliques varied from class to class, of course, but it was an excellent sign that pupils were mindful of the attitude against them and addressed the issue openly. So is the fact that some graduates remember no unfriendliness at all. “I can remember little meanness and no cruelty,” recalled a student long after graduation, only “a simple, generous, and harmonious atmosphere.” Certainly Mary Hillard had a high regard for friendship. As she had written to Augustus Jaccaci, friendship is “much deeper than [the] exchange of thought, that is part of it, and a beautiful and stimulating part, but exchange of sympathies, and of courage, and of comfort may all be silent yet how tremendous is the difference it makes to have them. Such exchange is nothing short of spiritual.”
While she encouraged female friendships, she was wary of what she called “exaggerated friendship.” This was one of the topics that she talked to her girls about. In the December 1911 issue of The Lantern, an editor mentioned that “Miss Hillard’s annual talk on crushes came the other day,” but she did not elaborate on what the headmistress had said. When “crush” became a forbidden word, girls used other words like “want” and “tra-la” for it. Nevertheless, the adolescents exchanged valentines and flowers, made dates for going to chapel and concerts together, and slept in each other’s rooms and even in their beds. Younger girls who idolized older ones would go into a senior’s bedroom in the morning to shut her window or make her bed. This was natural and appears to
