chatted for about twenty minutes and then Nancy rang off because she wanted to wash her hair before dinner. Lynn replaced the receiver and wandered aimlessly into her bedroom. She decided to begin a letter to Paul.
She had nearly finished it when Rosalie announced that dinner was ready.
There were candles on the dinner table. It was one of the few things that Mrs. Chambers insisted upon, and, although her father scoffed at it, Lynn thought it a lovely custom. It gave the dining room warmth and grace and a kind of old-time charm. Beneath his laughing protests, she knew her father liked it, too.
The rest of the family was already at the table when Lynn slid into her seat. Her mother turned to her with a smile.
“Well, how was the first day of school? How does it feel to be a senior?”
“Not too different from being a junior,” Lynn admitted. “One thing is going to be different, though. Your daughter is not only a senior this year; she is going to be a debutante.”
“A debutante!” Her father looked up at the words. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”
“No,” Lynn said, laughing at the surprise on his face, “and I hadn’t either until today. Mrs. Peterson is organizing it. They told me about it at school, and then the invitation came this afternoon.” She pulled the small white envelope from her pocket and slid it across the table, then turned to help herself from the plateful of rolls Rosalie was serving. “Sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun. Nancy will be one, too.”
Her father read the invitation and handed it, wordlessly, to her mother.
Mrs. Chambers read it and laid it aside, saying, “This is a brand new thing, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a debutante in Rivertown before.”
“It sounds like something,” Dr. Chambers growled, “that that foolish Peterson woman would come up with.”
“Why, Daddy,” Lynn exclaimed in amazement, “you sound as though you don’t like the idea!”
“I don’t,” her father said shortly. “There’s enough class consciousness in this town already without starting something like this.”
Lynn was too surprised to answer. She turned to her mother.
“Mother—”
“It does sound like Mrs. Peterson,” Mrs. Chambers said slowly. “She’s such an organizer. I suppose, being from Philadelphia and all that, she feels that making a debut is about the most important thing in a girl’s life. She probably doesn’t want Brenda to miss the experience.”
“Brenda!” Dodie snorted disdainfully from her side of the table. “Brenda Peterson is a class ‘A’ drip, and no debut is going to make her anything else.”
Mrs. Chambers shook her head disapprovingly at her younger daughter. “Dodie, that’s a horrid way to talk! You don’t really know the Peterson girl. After all, she’s in Lynn’s class, not yours.”
“I don’t care whose class she’s in,” Dodie said decidedly. “She’s a drip and everybody in school knows it. Why, she wouldn’t be invited to anything if they didn’t live at the top of the Hill and her mother wasn’t head of every woman’s club in town.”
“Mrs. Peterson is the head of a lot of things,” Mrs. Chambers admitted. “But I doubt that that makes a difference to the other young people.”
“Well, it does,” Dodie insisted. “Doesn’t it Lynn?”
Lynn nodded. “Yes, I 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