suppose it does. Brenda is a drip, Mother, just as Dodie says. She’s not pretty; well, she’s not exactly homely either. It’s just—” She paused, trying to think of the right words. “If you took her feature by feature and asked yourself, ‘is her face all right?’ and ‘are her legs nice?’ and ‘does she have good teeth?’—you would have to answer yes. There’s nothing wrong with her exactly, but when you add everything up, she just doesn’t seem to come out to anything. She’s sort of a wish-washy little thing. Nobody really dislikes her, but nobody especially likes her either.”
Dr. Chambers looked interested. “She seems to be at all the parties,” he commented.
“She almost has to be. Her mother gives parties for her, and we are all asked, so, of course, when we give parties, we have to ask her back. But nobody notices her, once she’s there.”
“She doesn’t have many dates, does she?” Dodie asked. Dodie had only recently begun to go out with boys, and this phase of life interested her especially.
“I don’t know,” Lynn answered. “I don’t think so. To tell the truth, I haven’t thought of her enough to notice.”
Mrs. Chambers shook her head sadly.
“What a sad situation for a young girl. Mrs. Peterson is such a driving force, I can imagine how she reacts to having a daughter who is—well—”
“A drip,” Dodie put in mischievously. “Go ahead and say it, Mother. A drip. It’s the only word that will do.”
“No, I will not say it,” her mother said decidedly. “I will not call the poor little thing a name like that. But I can see how frantic Mrs. Peterson must be to organize a whole debutante system in a town this size, just to bring Brenda forth into society. She probably thinks that making a debut is a magic formula designed to—to—”
Again she hesitated, searching for land words.
‘To put wings on caterpillars!” Dodie burst out laughing. “Oh, Mother, don’t look so horrified! You can’t always say nothing but nice things about everybody.”
“And you don’t have to go out of your way to make unpleasant comparisons,” Mrs. Chambers said quietly. “Dodie, that sharp tongue of yours is not your most appealing asset.”
Lynn turned back to her father, changing the subject. “You didn’t mean it did you, Daddy, about not liking the idea of my making a debut? Everybody is going to be doing it.”
“Everybody in Rivertown?”
“No, of course not but all my good friends are—Nancy and Holly and Joan, oh, all the girls on the Hill. It will be just ‘the thing’ this year.”
“It may be ‘the thing,’” Dr. Chambers said slowly, “but that doesn’t make it right. It’s something I don’t like to see starting. There is already a disturbing quality growing in this town, a separating of the people according to where they live and how much money they have, a feeling that doesn’t belong in a place of this size. It’s bad enough when it exists among the adult population, but it’s a tragedy to carry it down into the schools. A public school should be a mixing place, an opportunity for all the young people of the town to get to know each other.”
“But having debutantes wouldn’t change anything!” Dodie exclaimed. “The kids from the Hill go around together anyhow, so what’s the difference whether they make debuts or not?”
Dr. Chambers turned to Lynn. “Is that so? Are all your friends from the Hill?”
“Well, most of them, I guess,” Lynn admitted. “We just sort of seem to have more in common, so we go around together.”
“Then this debutante setup is worse than I thought,” her father said quietly. “It’s going to set the dividing line and make it official. It looks to me as though this Peterson woman is going to put the final touch on destroying what might have been a very nice town.”
Lynn stared at her father in horror, not believing her ears. “You mean you’re not going to let me make my debut!”
Dr. Chambers shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lynn. I just can’t go along with it.”
Lynn turned helplessly to her mother. “Mother, you don’t agree with him, do you? Talk to him—make him see—”
“I’m sorry, dear,” Mrs. Chambers said slowly, “but this is something for your father to decide.”
“But, why?” Lynn cried. “Don’t you see what this will mean? All my friends are going to be debutantes. There will be all the parties and dances. It’s going to last the whole year long. What good is it going to do the town not to have me part of it? They’re going to have debutantes anyway. If I decline the invitation, they’ll just pick somebody else to take my place.”
“Lynn will be out of it all,” Dodie chimed in. “It will be like she was in jail or somewhere fenced off. She can’t go to anything!”
Lynn was momentarily surprised at her sister’s ardent defense. Then she realized that Dodie was probably looking further ahead, to the next year, when she herself would be a senior and eligible to be a debutante.
“I am sorry,” Dr. Chambers said. “I don’t want to make you girls unhappy, but I feel very strongly about this. It is something of which I do not approve. I am going to fight it every step of the way, and I can’t very well talk publicly against it if my own daughter is part of it.”
Lynn’s eyes filled with angry tears.
“But, Daddy—”
Her mother leaned forward, placing a warning hand on her tense fingers.
“All right, Lynn, I think that’s enough discussion for the moment. Let’s drop the whole thing for now. You and your father both think it over, and we’ll talk about it again in the morning.”
After she had excused herself from the table, Lynn went upstairs to her room and picked up her letter to Paul. It was practically complete, but she sat down at her desk and added another page, telling him about the dinner table discussion and about her father’s attitude.
She wrote bitterly:
It’s not fair. It’s just not fair. You know what it would mean, Paul; that we couldn’t go to anything during Christmas vacation! Not anything! That’s when all the big dances will be, and then the Presentation Ball in the spring, and you would be home for that, too!
She wrote on, becoming more and more angry. When she finished, she folded the pages, put them into an envelope and wrote Paul’s college address on the front. Then she sealed it and went downstairs to find a stamp.
She paused at the door to the living room, seeing her mother alone, watching television.
“Has Daddy gone out?”
Her mother looked up. “Yes, dear he has gone out on an emergency call. One of the Turner children fell on the stairs. Her mother called in a panic; she says the child can’t seem to move her legs.”
Lynn exclaimed, “The poor little thing!” Having a doctor for a father, she was used to hearing about accidents and injuries,
