Word: headmistresses
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...interesting thing about these schools is that they always have a tonic effect on the girls. The results are just what everybody except the headmistress and the founder would hope for. At least they were in the case of the one Mary Burnham girl whose history I am up on. She now requires frequent large doses of scotch, wears her hair over one eye, and believes in Dartmouth weekends. And she goes to Connecticut College for Women, where they have plenty of telephones...
Juliana insisted that her daughters attend a public school, once instructed the headmistress not to "tell stories about fairy princesses or any stuff like that." The children have the Orange matter-of-factness. Recently, vacationing, Princess Beatrix grew impatient with a crowd of gaping local children. She presented herself on the porch of her parents' house. "This is how I look in front," she said, and turned. "This is how I look in back. Now go away and leave me alone...
Duty, Not Reward. To keep the girls from outspending each other, the headmistress dresses them in green jumpers and cotton dresses. Lipstick, smoking, furs and Washington charge accounts are forbidden. So are unchaperoned dates...
Miss Madeira has a simple definition of education: "Discipline of the mind." The headmistress disciplines Madeira minds on liberal arts, the Bible and public affairs (she teaches the last two subjects herself). Exams are tough, but no marks are ever posted. Miss Madeira believes, with Robert Louis Stevenson, that "the world must return ... to the word duty and be done with the word reward." She also drums into the girls two mottoes of her own: "Function in disaster" and "Finish in style...
...appears in student and faculty plays (some recent roles: the sultan in Arabian Nights, Two-Gun Dick in a Wild West show). Last week the girls put on a birthday performance of Miss Madeira's favorite scenes from Shakespeare and watched her cut an enormous cake. Then the headmistress, in a new flowered print dress, made a speech in praise of longevity ("Growing old is a delightful experience") and teaching ("A journey in the country of the mind"). Was Miss Madeira planning to quit? Said she: "I'm going to retire when the girls think...