The Charm School by Susan Wiggs Read Free Book Online

so swiftly.
    So permanently. And so dramatically, with Chad Easterbrook’s note tucked close to her heart.
    But in the end, she turned away, as cowardly of her own impulses as she was of everything else that required a backbone.
    How long, she wondered, had she despised herself? She knew she hadn’t come to her unhappy state of self-loathing quickly or without deliberation. It had taken all of her endlessly long maiden years to reach it.
    Sinful, Isadora told herself. And self-indulgent to feel this terrible. But then, she was a sinful creature. Every dark and unattractive impulse resided within her—sloth, envy, covetousness, yearning. Desire. She was guilty of all that and more.
    From the time she left her great aunt’s house, she had been taught that a young lady must be pretty and popular. An accident of birth had placed her smack in the middle of two gorgeous sisters and two perfect brothers. How wonderful life must seem to them, how thrilling to awaken each day and know that it would be a pleasant one.
    Isadora knew what happiness felt like. She had been happy once. She had been happy with Aunt Button.
    She closed her eyes, thinking back to the days of her youth. When Isadora was five. Aunt Button came down from Salem. Strong-willed as a military general, she had no use for pretty things, and that included pretty greatnieces. She amazed Isadora by being more taken with her conversation and interests than with the charm and beauty of the others. She whisked her off to Salem and the Peabodys barely noticed.
    Aunt Button and Isadora had a jolly time there—Isadora became better educated than any boy. Aunt Button taught her that there was nothing unseemly about this. Isadora’s appearance simply didn’t matter to her. Nor did it matter to Isadora.
    Until the day Aunt Button died and Isadora was forced to return to the Beacon Hill mansion of her parents.
    She would never forget the look on her mother’s face when she walked in the door. Her words were simple: “And here is Isadora, back with us again.” But it was the expression on her face that lived in Isadora’s heart and shaped all the days and months and endless years that came after.
    The bright, untidy fourteen-year-old had no idea how to transform herself into a society belle. She knew too much Greek, Latin, Hebrew and mathematics to be popular and cared too much about social responsibility to be trusted.
    So here she stood, dying by inches. Shriveling like a prune in the pantry, plain and colorless and feeling more desperate than ever. She wished her parents would leave her to her books and studies, but they kept thrusting her out into society where she gasped like a beached fish.
    And by shoving her before the shipping heirs and Harvard princelings, they had inadvertently sparked a dream in Isadora—the dream of Chad Easterbrook. It was absurd, really, to yearn for such a perfect specimen of manhood, but she couldn’t help herself. She kept thinking that if she tried hard enough, she might one day come to mean something to him.
    Picking up a button hook, she strained her arms to reach the back.
    Yanking at one of the buttons, she heard a tearing sound, but she didn’t care. She would never wear this abominable dress again.
    When she had stripped down to her chemise, she remembered Chad’s note—slightly damp—tucked between her breasts.
    “Oh, Aunt Button,” she whispered to the empty room.
    “What shall I do?
    What can possibly save me now?”
    She wanted to burn the note. She should burn it. But in the end she did something much, much better. She did exactly what her Aunt Button would have done: she gave in to her strengths, such as they were.
    Walking purposefully to the writing desk by the window, she dipped a quill and composed a note of her own.
    A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious. A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the