Page:Advice to young ladies on their duties and conduct in life - Arthur - 1849.djvu/74

66 Not one cause alone, but many causes combined, go to produce this result. There is much of actual disability to rise far above her condition, which tends to keep a young girl down, resulting from want of education, refined and intelligent companionship, and the almost invariable necessity for constant and wearying labor with her hands. These all unite to hinder mental improvement, a cultivation of the taste, refinement of manner, and the attainment of those accomplishments so indispensable to a woman, and without which a poor girl cannot rise above her first estate in life. But all these combined need not hinder her elevation if she will but look up, and strive after the attainment of real virtue, intelligence, and grace of mind and body. It is not so much the condition into which a young woman is born, that excludes her from familiar intercourse with the intelligent and refined of her own and the other sex, as it is her lack of that intelligence and refinement which is in itself the social bond of union among them. Pride in those above her is not so strong to keep her down, as disabilities and unfitnesses in herself. These, at first, are her misfortunes; but, afterwards, they may become her faults.

The mere introduction of one, born and educated in a low condition in life, into the society