In no essential respect did Margot’s routine of life differ from that of her mother--and her mother’s routine of inane and worthless time-killing was modeled exactly upon that of all the fashionable women and apers of fashionable women. Edna did a vast amount of studying, with and without teachers. It was all shallow and showy. Margot’s studies were also beneath contempt. I amused myself from time to time by inquiring--with pretense of gravity--into what they were teaching her at the Ryper school for the turning out of fashionable womanhood. Such a mess of trash! She was learning much about social usages, from how to sit in a carriage--a rare art that, I assure you, gentle reader--to how to receive guests at a large dinner. She was studying some of the vulgarities--science, history, literature, and the like--but in no vulgar way. She would get only the thinnest smatter of talkable stuff about them--nothing “unsettling,” nothing that might possibly rouse the mind to think or distract the attention from the “high” things of life. She was dabbling in music, in drawing, in several similar costly fripperies. And the sum total of expense!--well, no wonder Miss Ryper was fast becoming as rich as some of the asteroids in the plutocracy she adored. I regarded Margot’s education as a species of joke. It never occurred to me that our pretty baby had the right to be educated to become a wife and a mother. And why should it have occurred to me? Where is that being done? Who is thinking of it? In all the oceans of twaddle about the elevation of woman where is there a drop of good sense about _real_ education? You say I was criminally negligent as to my daughter’s education. But how about your own? The truth is, we all still look upon education as a frill, an ornament. We never think of it, whether for our sons or for our daughters, as nothing more or less than teaching a human being how to live. It is high time to end this idiotic ignorant exaltation of tomfoolery into culture!