MISS ASHTON’S ADVICE.
That the formation of such an insignificant thing as this Demosthenic Club should have affected girls like Dorothy Ottley and Marion Parke would have seemed impossible; but it was destined to in ways and times that were beyond their control. When the club was making its selection of members, among those most sought were Marion and Dorothy. Marion, with her cheery, social Western manners, made her way rapidly into one of those favoritisms which are so common in girls’ boarding-schools. She always had a pleasant word for every one, and always was ready to do a kind, generous act. She was so pretty, too, and dressed so simply and neatly, that there was nothing to find fault with, even if the girls had not been, as girls are, in truth, as a class, generous, noble, on the alert to see what is good, rather than what is otherwise, in those with whom they live. As for Dorothy, she was the model girl of the school. The teachers trusted and loved her, so did the pupils. No one among them all said how the sea had browned and almost roughened her plain face; how hard work, 56 anxiety, and poor fare had stunted her growth; how carrying the cross children, too big and too heavy, had given a stoop to her delicate shoulders, and knots on her hands, that told too plainly of burdens they were unable to lift. All that the school saw or thought of was the gentle love that was always in the large gray eyes, the kind words that the firm lips never failed to speak, and the steady, straightforward, honorable life of the best scholar.
“If we can only get those two,” said President Jenny Barton, “our club is made.”
“They are so good, they’ll spoil the fun,” said Mamie Smythe.
“For shame!” said Martha Dodd. “You don’t suppose the daughter of a missionary would join a club of which good girls could not be members!”
“Or the cousin of so famous a man as Kane, the Arctic explorer,” said Sophy Kane.
“Don’t dispute, girls; we seem to spend half our time wrangling,” and the president knocked, with what she made answer for the speaker’s gavel, noisily on the table. “I nominate our vice-president, Miss Underwood, to inform these young ladies of their having been chosen, and to report from them at our next meeting.
“Is the nomination accepted?”
“Ay! ay!” from the club.
In accordance with this request, Kate Underwood had interviewed Marion and Dorothy secretly, and had received from both a positive refusal. 57
“I have no time for secret societies,” said Dorothy with a good-natured laugh. “I want twice as many hours for my studies. Thank you, all the same, Kate.”
“Secret society! what is that?” asked Marion. “What is it secret for? What do you do in it that you don’t want to have known? I don’t like the secret part of it. My father used to tell me about the secret societies in Yale College, and they were full of boys’ scrapes. He nearly got turned out of college for his part in one of them; and if I should get turned out from here, it would break his heart. No, thank you, I’d better not.”
So, sure that no from them meant no, Kate had reported to the club, and received permission to invite Susan Downer and Gladys Philbrick in their places.
“Sue will come of course, and be glad to,” the club said. “Really, on the whole, she will be better than Dorothy, for Dorothy always wants to toe the line.”
Of Gladys, they by no means felt so sure. “She is, and she isn’t,” Lucy Snow said; “but she has lots of money, and that means splendid spreads.”
“But she won’t—she won’t”—Martha Dodd stopped.
“Won’t what?” asked the president in a most dignified manner.
“Won’t go through the corridors with her boots in her hands,” said Mamie with a rueful face, “and 58 get dosed. She’d stamp right along into Miss Ashton’s room, and say,—
“‘Miss Ashton, I’m late. Mark me, will you?’”
“She will keep us straight, then. I vote for Gladys;” and the first to hold up her hands—both of them—was Missionary Dodd.
So Gladys and Susan were invited to become members of the club, and accepted gladly, not knowing their room-mates had declined the same honor.
It was in this way that the club was to influence the rooms.
October, the regal month, when nature puts on her most precious vestments, dons her crowns of gold, clothes herself in scarlet robes, with girdles of richest browns, has a half-hushed note of sadness in the anthems she sings through the dropping leaves, listens for the farewell of departing birds, and tries in vain to call back to the browning earth the dying flowers. This month was always considered in Montrose Academy the time for settling down to hard work in earnest. Vacation, with its rest and its pleasures, seemed far behind the life of the two hundred young girls who had entered into, and been absorbed by, the present, and who were roused by ambitions for the future.
Marion’s room-mates went thoroughly into the work required of them.
“Your faithfulness during the first six weeks of the term,” Miss Ashton had said to them in one of 59 her morning talks, “will determine your standard for the year. Do not any of you think you can be indolent now, and pick up your neglected studies by and by.
“You may trust my experience when I tell you that, in the whole number of years since I have been connected with this school, I never knew a pupil who failed in her duties during the first half of the first term of the year, who afterwards did, indeed could, make up the lost opportunities.
“It is not only what you lose out of the passing recitation that you can never find again, but, of even more consequence, it is what you lose in forming honest, faithful habits of study.
“There are many different ways of studying. I have often tried to make these plain to you. I will repeat them. First, learn to give your whole attention to your lesson; fix your mind upon it. This sounds as if it would be an easy thing to do; but, in truth, it is very difficult. I am sorry to say I do not think there are a dozen girls among you who can do this successfully, even after years of training. You can train your body to accomplish wonders, but it is hard to believe that the mind is even more capable of being brought into subjection by the will than the body; and, to do that, to make your mind your servant, is to accomplish the greatest result of your education. Only as far as your study and your general life here do that, are they of any true value to you. 60
“You will ask me how are you to fix your attention when there are so many things going on around you to distract your thoughts? I can only answer, that as our minds are in many respects of different orders, so, no general rule can be given. If you will, each one, faithfully make the attempt, I have no doubt you will succeed, in just the same proportion as you are faithful.
“It may be as well, as I consider this the keystone of all good study, that I should leave the other helps and hindrances for some future talk; and it will give me a great deal of pleasure if I can hear from any of you at the end of a week’s trial, that you have found yourselves helped by my advice.”
It speaks well for Miss Ashton’s influence over her school that there was not a pupil there who was not moved by what she had said.
To be sure, its effect was not equally apparent. There were some who had scant minds to fix, and what nature had been niggardly in bestowing, they had frittered away in a trifling life; but for the earnest girls, those who truly longed to make the most of themselves and to be able to do a worthy work in the life before them, such advice became at once a help.
“It sounds like my mother’s letter to me,” Marion Parke said to Dorothy, as they went together to their room. “She insists that it is not so much the facts we learn, as the help they give us in the use of our minds. I wonder if all educated people think the same?” 61
“All thoroughly educated people I am sure do,” answered Dorothy. “Sometimes I feel as if my mind was a musical instrument; and if I didn’t know every note in it, the only sounds I should ever hear from it would be discords,”—at which rather Irish comparison, both girls laughed.