Empty Mansions

certain that the camp had a small hospital and a nurse. Still in existence today, the camp has trained thousandsof Scout leaders and given generations of girls a summer experience of close community in the wilderness.
    For years after Andrée’s death, Girl Scouts wrote letters to Anna, thanking her for making it possible for them, too, to see what life may be.
CULTIVATE IMAGINATION

 
    H UGUETTE ’ S UPBRINGING was already artistically strong, with music lessons, painting lessons, and a family home that was essentially a public art gallery. Her sense of imagination was enhanced by her high school education in the 1920s at Miss Spence’s Boarding and Day School for Girls.
    Miss Spence’s was one of the favorite schools in Manhattan for the daughters of the elite. Admission was a patent of American nobility. The same year that Huguette enrolled as a day student at the school, three of her half-nieces, her peers in age, enrolled as well. These were the daughters of Huguette’s half-brother Charlie. Karine McCall, the daughter of one of those nieces, Agnes Clark Albert, said thatAgnes had been told by her mother to keep an eye on Huguette, to watch out for her, as though Huguette needed protection. Her protector, Andrée, was gone.
    Classes at Miss Spence’s met in a converted brownstone residence on West Fifty-Fifth Street, where the chauffeurs of the Carnegies, Fricks, and Clarks lined up at the curb.
    The school’s lively, artistic tone was set by its founder, Clara Spence, a Scottish actress who loved to read Shakespeare aloud and could be talked into dancing the Highland fling. Miss Spence emphasized standards of scholarship, for this was the highest education most of her young ladies would receive. Of the fifty-six students in Huguette’s class of 1925, only fourteen were aiming for college. The rest, including Huguette, were on the marriage track. Within a few years after Huguette’s class of 1925, that ratio would reverse, with most Spence girls headed to college. Along with elocution and Latin, Huguette and her classmates studied sewing and practical math, needed to manage a home budget. The sewing class, in which the girls made baby clothes to be pinned into a scrapbook, was a Spence tradition.
    The teaching was warm and the curriculum innovative, with options such as fencing lessons. The art classes appealed particularly to Huguette. She recalled that one of her dance teachers was Isadora Duncan,known for her modern choreography, her outspokenness about political and sexual matters, and her flowing silk scarves, including the one that killed her when it became caught in the wheel of an automobile.
    Miss Spence’s motto for her school was the Latin “
Non scholae sed vitae discimus,”
meaning “Not for school but for life we learn.” She urged her ladies to emphasize more than just book knowledge, more than reason:
    I beg you to cultivate imagination, which means to develop your power of sympathy, and I entreat you to decide thoughtfully what makes a human being great in his time and in his station. The faculty of imagination is often lightly spoken of as of no real importance, often decried as mischievous, as in some ways the antithesis of practical sense, and yet it ranks with reason and conscience as one of the supreme characteristics by which man is distinguished from all other animals.… Sympathy, the great bond between human beings, is largely dependent on imagination—that is, upon the power of realizing the feelings and the circumstances of others so as to enable us to feel with and for them.
    Decorum, morals, and good judgment were expected. The girls wore simple skirts extending at least three inches below the knee. Parents were urged to send their girls to school without extravagances: no jewelry except a simple ring and a simple pin, no perfume, no scented face powder, no lipstick. Church attendance was mandatory. Spence girls curtsied to their elders. One student who received an overly affectionate telegram from her beau was surprised to learn that she had two choices, either leave school or announce her engagement.
    Each spring the girls took turns playing host at a round of teas for their classmates. Huguette threw other parties as well. “Miss Huguette Clark, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Andrews Clark of 962 Fifth Avenue entertained a party of girlfriends yesterday at Sherry’s,” the popular restaurant,
The New York Times
reported in May 1922, when Huguette was nearly