Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/134

126 drawing-room. They are circumstances of her existence which she takes care shall give her no trouble — conditions of her married life which represent a certain loss of time and so much personal annoyance, reduced by wise management to a minimum; and she has no desire to inflict on her friends a corvée repudiated by herself. So far her visiting world has cause for gratitude. But the mother whose maternal instinct is large and her reasoning faculties small, who prides herself on her love for her offspring, and insists that her acquaintances shall partake in her glory, adopts the foolish plan of having the children brought down to see all her visitors, and of converting her drawing-room into a small bear-garden, where every one is uncomfortable alike. The children are the axis on which all the conversation turns. You are expected to be interested when you are told of their gifts and graces — how Mary writes verses and Tommy makes music, and how sweetly Ellen and Harry repeat their poetry — just as you are expected to be polite when they pull your whiskers and fight for your watch, and to smile, as at a good acrobatic feat, when Jacky makes a flying leap into your hat, Harry scrambles on to your knee and informs the company that you wear a wig, and that he can see gold in your mouth. The natural sequel to such a course is that the position becomes untenable even for the most indulgent mother, and that the darlings are sent in the end to school, there to continue their education.

After the forcing-houses of the nursery and the drawing-room, their minds are now sufficiently matured to develop any seeds for evil and precocious knowledge that may drop into the untitled soil; and, on getting to their first school, it is generally enough for children to unite their experiences to get all the doubtful points cleared up which have exercised the youthful mind ever since the days of the first man. It is at this stage of their existence that we hear of mothers being shocked at the revelations made by their own children. Things which a generation ago were known only at the proper age, and when ignorance would have been folly, are whispered in corners among these callow investigators; and the one who has most to tell is the one who is king or queen of the rest. When the mother snatches her child from this unsatisfactory school, and that undesirable companion, she thinks perhaps that she has saved it; but the fruit of the tree of knowledge when eaten opens the eyes so that they can I never close again, and what the mind has once received the memory can never reject. In the more advanced schools the dangers attached to unlimited confidences are so well understood that experienced matrons have recourse to various stratagems to prevent their possibility. Two girls will not be allowed to consort together for any length of time; and whispering and low voices are expressly forbidden. In walking out they must go in threes, or with a different companion for each day. Governesses have directions to watch all preferential couplings, and to break them up by adding a third to the party; not ostentatiously, so as to cause suspicion of motives, which would be as bad perhaps as the evil sought to be prevented, but with the craft of quietness, the hypocrisy of concealment — which we may cite as one instance of the lawfulness of doing good by underhand methods. Those schools are the best where the social feeling is most encouraged in contradistinction to the personal and individual; and in saying this we say all that need be told. Add to this, unresting occupation, whether it be learning or amusement, business or play — at all events, the disallowance of sloth and self-indulgence in every form — and the dangers of school-life are reduced to their lowest possible sum, with so much good to come from wise guardianship and well-chosen employments as shall go far to neutralize what remains and keep the girls as fresh and pure as is possible in these odd days of ours.

Emerging then from a life of full occupation at school, girls are more to be pitied then envied on their first acknowledged entrance into society. They are scolded by captious fathers weary of milliners' bills and midnight revels; measured with a commercial eye by mercenary mothers, who regard them as so much stock for profitable sale and barter; snubbed by fastidious brothers, who sometimes find them in their way, and who generally are in the state to compare them unfavourably with some Cynthia of the minute in the ascendant. Competition with other girls, who have passed before them through the fire to Moloch, drives off the lingering shyness of the seminary, and the maiden blush vanishes with the appetite for bread and butter. Rinking on the one hand, and the shrieking sisterhood on the other, divide the young womanhood of London between them, and the previous standards of right and wrong, once held so essential to the well-being of society, are completely overthrown on a 