To the father he held up the utilitarian advantages of an education.
"Your boy is quick--why should not Tony be a master of men some day?
Give him a chance to climb." "Oui, by gar! Antoine he's smart lee'le feller.

I mak him steeck on his book, you mak him one big boss on some mill." To the mother the master spoke of social advantages.

The empty-headed Irish woman who had all the quick wit and cleverness of tongue characteristic of her race was determined that her girl Annette should learn to be as stylish as "them that tho't themselves her betters." So the children were kept at school by their fondly ambitious parents, and the master did the rest.
At the Public School, that greatest of all democratic institutions, the Perrotte children met the town youth of their own age, giving and taking on equal terms, sharing common privileges and advantages and growing into a community solidarity all their own, which in later years brought its own harvest of mingling joy and bitterness, but which on the whole made for sound manhood and womanhood.
With the girl Annette one effect of the Public School and its influences, educational and social, was to reveal to her the depth of the educational and social pit from which she had been taken.

Her High School training might have fitted her for the teaching profession and completed her social emancipation but for her vain and thriftless mother, who, socially ambitious for herself but more for her handsome, clever children, found herself increasingly embarrassed for funds.

She lacked the means with which to suitably adorn herself and her children for the station in life to which she aspired and for which good clothes were the prime equipment and to "eddicate" Tony as he deserved.