Stray Thoughts for Girls | Page 3

life, past and future, his faults and blunders, his strong and weak
points, his hopes, the books he meant to read and to write, the friends
he wished to make. I am sure that thinking over our own lives as a
whole would strengthen and guide us. We rush into action and fight our
best, but we do not make a plan of the campaign, and thus much of our
energy is wasted by misdirected effort; and, in leaving a school-life of
rule and regularity, you will be much tempted to slip through the day
without the safeguard of a life of Rule; but, until you are the saints you
are called to be, you cannot afford to do without this help. We must
remember the warning of St. Francis de Sales against playing at being

angels before we are men and women.
On the other hand, you will need to guard against the temptation to
make your rules unbending and inconsiderate, to follow your ideal,
heedless of the fact that you thereby become tiresome to your people.
How often the home people feel jealous of school, and say it has cut a
girl off from her home interests, that she comes back full of outside
friendships and interests and new principles. Of course she does; if not,
what good would school have done her? But she ought to feel how
natural and how loving is this (often unexpressed) jealousy, and, by
sympathetic tact, to avoid rousing it, and not to be always thrusting
school interests down home throats. The duty of a life of rule at home
is all the more complex because home pleasures are duties too; if it was
only a question of self-denial it would be plain sailing, but your mother
likes you to go out, and your brothers want you, and if you refuse to
enjoy yourself it hurts them: if you even betray that you would rather
be doing something else, you spoil their pleasure, for a "martyr" to
home duty is a most depressing sight to gods and men. And the
complexity lies in the fact that you enjoy going, and conscience pricks
you every now and then because you never read, and you seem to go
through the day in a slipshod way, with no definite rule,--no daily
cross-bearing, no self-restraint to give salt to the day. At school you
have a definite duty of self-improvement set before you, and everything
urges you to follow it. This remains a duty when you go home, but it is
very hard to reconcile it with the many things that clash--not the least
of these being our own laziness when the help of external pressure is
taken away. You have had intellectual advantages, and you will be
downright sinful if you fritter all your time away over flowers and
tennis, and never read because you do not like to be thought unsociable:
you are bound to improve your talents, but take it as your motto, that
_rules should be iron when they clash with our own wishes, and wax
when they clash with those of others_.
Yet we must yield sensibly, and not allow our time to be needlessly
wasted--at all events, by brothers and sisters and friends. It is different
with a father or mother: they are only lent to us for a part of our lives,
and no memory of sensible, useful work will be to us the same pleasure

in after years as the thought of the time that passed more pleasantly for
a mother because we spent it in idle (!) talk, or the knowledge that a
father had enjoyed the feeling that we were always at hand if he wanted
us. A strong-minded woman might consider matters differently, and
feel that a language learnt, or a district visited, was of more value, but
we shall not be able to reason so when we see life in the new light
which death throws upon it; the little restrictions of home life will then
assume a very different aspect.
Unless you are driven with an unusually loose rein, you will probably
be irked by having to be punctual, and to account for your letters and
for your goings and comings; but if you ever feel inclined to resent it,
just think what it will be when you are left free--free to be late because
there is no one to wait dinner for you, free to come and go as you will
because there is no one who cares whether you are tired or not; some of
these days you will give anything to be once more so "fettered."
Higher education often makes girls feel it waste of time to write notes
for their mothers, and to settle the drawing-room flowers: they "must
go and