Page:Advice to young ladies on their duties and conduct in life - Arthur - 1849.djvu/126

118 she almost always does wrong, and suffers therefrom either bodily or mental pain.

Obedience in childhood is that by which we are led and guided into right actions. When we become men and women, reason takes the place of obedience; but, like a young bird just fluttering from its nest, reason at first has not much strength of wing; and we should therefore suffer the reason of those who love us, like the mother-bird, to stoop under and bear us up in our earlier efforts, lest we fall bruised and wounded to the ground. To whose reason should a young girl look to strengthen her own, so soon as to her mother’s, guided as it is by love? But it too often happens that, under the first impulses of conscious freedom, no voice is regarded but the voice of inclination and passion. The mother may oppose, and warn, and urge the most serious considerations, but the daughter turns a deaf ear to all. She thinks that she knows best. Let us give a case in point.

“You are not going to-night, Mary?” said a mother, coming into her daughter's room, and finding her dressing for a ball. She had been rather seriously indisposed, for some days, with a cold that had fallen upon her throat and chest, which was weak, but was now something better.