City girls and
country girls alike know the meaning of this discontent, which sometimes
amounts to morbidness, and again only to nervous irritability.
I once knew and marveled at a young person who spent her languid
existence idly lounging in a rocking-chair, eating candy, and reading
novels, whilst her mother bustled about, provoking by her activity an
occasional remonstrance from her indolent daughter. "Do, ma, keep
still," she would say, with amiable wonder at ma's notable ways. This
incarnation of sweet selfishness was hateful in my eyes, and I have
often queried, in the twenty years which have passed since I saw her,
what sort of woman she made. As a girl she was vexatious, though no
ripple of annoyance crossed the white brow, no frown obscured it, and no
flurry of impatience ever tossed the yellow curls. She had no
aspirations which candy and a rocking-chair could not gratify. It is not
so with girls of a larger mind and greater vitality--the girls, for
instance, in our own neighborhood, whom we have known since they were
babies. Many of them feel very much dissatisfied with life, and do not
hesitate to say so; and, strangely enough, the accident of a collegiate
or common-school education makes little difference in their conclusions.
"To what end," says the former, "have I studied hard, and widened my
resources? I might have been a society girl, and had a good time, and
been married and settled sometime, without going just far enough to find
out what pleasure there is in study, and then stopping short.
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