"
I am quoting from what girls have said to me--girls who have been
graduated with distinction, and whose parents preferred that they should
neither teach, nor paint, nor enter upon a profession, nor engage in any
paid work. Polished after the similitude of a palace, what should the
daughters do except stay at home to cheer father and mother, play and
sing in the twilight, read, shop, sew, visit, receive their friends, and
be young women of elegant leisure? If love, and love's climax, the
wedding march, follow soon upon a girl's leaving school, she is taken
out of the ranks of girlhood, and in accepting woman's highest vocation,
queenship in the kingdom of home, foregoes the ease of her girlish life
and its peril of _ennui_ and unhappiness together. This, however, is the
fate of the minority, and while young people continue, as thousands do,
to dread beginning home life upon small means, it must so remain.
Education is not a fetich, though some who ought to know better regard
it in that superstitious light. No amount of school training, dissevered
from religious culture and from that development of the heart and of the
conscience without which intellectual wealth is poverty, will lift
anybody, make anybody happier or better, or fit anybody for blithe
living in this shadowy world. I have no doubt that there are numbers of
girls whose education, having made them objects of deep respect to their
simple fathers and mothers, has also gone far to make the old home
intolerable, the home ways distasteful, and the old people, alas!
subjects of secret, deprecating scorn.
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