PART VII.
THE OLD-FASHIONED GIRL.
“Modest as morn, as midday bright,
Gentle as evening.”
(A girl described by the poet Andrew Marvell.)
A MARVELLOUS GIRL
By the old-fashioned girl is not here meant the girl of a type extinct, but the girl of a type still existing, if in less numbers than of old. I have a sheaf of letters by this girl beside me. None of these letters bears date earlier than 1893. One of them, written on Christmas morning of that year, begins—
“To-day is just like a beautiful Spring morning, the crocuses and buds showing above ground, and all the buds forward.”
A week later, the writer announces—
“The weather is so open that Eva was able to pick some rosebuds on Christmas Day.”
Under date February 12th, 1894, there is the following—
“The kitten Sixpenny is getting plump on bullfinches which the gardener shoots. They do a lot of damage to the fruit-buds.”
The same letter contains this communication—
“The violets and camellias are backward this year, but all the crocuses and snowdrops are now at their best, and we daily examine daffodil buds.”
“Jacob, a jackdaw,” is mentioned in a subsequent letter, where the reference to him runs—
“Jacob, a jackdaw, has been lately acquired. He resides in a big aviary, and sometimes has a rabbit put in with him to get change of air.”
A girl who writes letters like that is a girl who would have been after the heart of Gilbert White of Selborne.
The old-fashioned girl is sentimental in so far as to be sentimental is to have a tender and susceptible heart, for her sentimentality is not of that order the other name of which is mawkishness. In fact, it is of a kind that justifies the singular assertion made by gentle William Shenstone: “The French use the word naïve in such a sense as to be explainable by no English word, unless we will submit to restrain ourselves in the application of the word sentimental.”
This sentimentality, the other name of which is naïveté of feeling, in the old-fashioned girl led her to say the other day to a woman whom she loved, “I wonderfully admire you,” and naïveté of feeling it is that inspires phrasing so charming as this, which I cite from the letter (date May 1st, 1894) of an old-fashioned girl: “It is four years since I have seen you, my friend, except by letters.”
An Infant Phenomenon
There he’s the darlingest dearest cleverest, brightest little fellow in the world. Yes he is.
It has been said in the foregoing that the old-fashioned girl exists in less numbers to-day than in days gone by; so far is she, however, from being as uncommon as the great auk, that I who write this have only to shut my eyes to see a long procession of old-fashioned girls pass before me.
First passes Ann (in her own explanatory phrasing, “plain A-double-N”), who always brings her letters to a close with “believe me,” and uses a nominative of address in writing a postcard.
Next pass Elizabeth, Betsy, Bessy and Bess—no Elsie, mark you.
Elizabeth wears boots with toe-caps, and is, we who know her believe, the last girl who will use the phrase, “canons of good taste.”
A VISITATION
There Mrs. Bile I’ve brought you another little pie of my own making
Betsy wears in winter a crotcheted muffler and Ringwood gloves. She always says at a visit’s end, “Now I must be going,” and generally says that she has “paid a visitation.” This makes new-fashioned people smile, and, as Betsy only says it when in merry pin, this pleases her. Betsy is a wag in her old-fashioned way. Thus she always counts her cherry-stones, and affects distress if they come to never. This also makes new-fashioned people smile.
Bessy we call “the quotation girl.” To Bessy, coffee is “the fragrant juice of Mocha’s berry brown,” and Bessy at the tea-table refers to “the cups that cheer, but not inebriate.” Bessy will herself only be described in a quotation—
“Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.”
Bess uses what we others call “dictionary words”—such words as pusillanimity and titillation. Bess—does this need telling?—hails from beyond Tweed.
Next passes Susan, who says, “Papa and mamma,” when she does not say “Father and mother.” The new-fashioned girl says “papa and mother.” Susan, too, prefers the word “lady” to “woman,” and “gentleman” to “man.” In fact, she has somewhat aristocratic leanings; but condescension is no part of her manner, for she knows that politeness levels up.
Next pass the Marys, some of whom are Pollys.
An old-fashioned girl
MINERVA
Polly, number one, combines a love of cookery with a love of bookery, to phrase the matter as a certain poet would have phrased it, and to these loves she adds a third, the love of needlework. If you should tell her that a good needlewoman makes a bad student, she will tell you in reply that Minerva beat Arachne in the art of needlework. She is so far from being a bad student that it is only part of her knowledge to know that.
Polly, number two, is not learned at all, but is of marvellous dexterity with her fingers. She should have lived in the days of spears and spindles, some people say. These people are of those who have nothing in their heads but a tongue.
Of the Marys called Mary, there passes first that Mary to whom, albeit her home is London, a Monday Popular Concert is not “a Pop,” and to whom a photograph is not a photo.
Next passes the Mary to whom an Ellen said—
“You must have been born grown-up, like a fly, Mary.”
To whom Mary: “What do you mean?”
“Why, don’t you know, goose, that flies don’t grow, that they—let me think of the way it’s put in the books—emerge from the larva in a perfect state?”
To which Mary, dreamily: “Do they? That’s very interesting.”
A less old-fashioned Mary might not have found a fact conveyed as that fact was conveyed in a primary degree “interesting.”
The old-fashioned girl is not always handled tenderly by the new-fashioned girl. “Here’s a description of you,” so sneers one Muriel, and reads aloud from a book, “A young lady in the possession of all the virtues which adorn the most amiable of her sex.”
To which the Mary sneered at answers, “No, no; that flatters me.”
Lastly, there passes Emma, the old-fashioned girl who heard lately with amazement that (so the new-fashioned girl phrased the matter) “cut glass is vulgar.”
“How can,” said Emma, “glass be vulgar?”
Emma lives in a world in which not only is cut glass still in estimation, but in which the word “vulgar” is used in a sense in which it is inapplicable to glass.
Emma is very fastidious in regard to phrasing. She is never caught using the form “different to,” and she follows the rule which prescribes the use of “better,” where the ungrammatical say “best.” Of her adjectives, which are few and carefully chosen, a favourite one is “elegant,” which she uses elegantly. Her spelling has an old-fashioned look. Thus she writes shew, sew, ribband and bason. She prefers carven to “carved,” and, in regard to another past participle, she is open to the gentle satire of the Cornhill essayist, who wrote in 1885 of “very young ladies” what follows—
“They write first, ‘his health was drunk,’ and then, alarmed at the apparent inebriety of that harmless past participle, alter it incontinently to ‘his health was drank.’”
REDGAUNTLET AND BLUE-STOCKING A NOVEL COMBINATION
Emma prefers the sound of “his health was drank” to that of “his health was drunk.” Such archaisms as to pen for to write, and a braid of hair for a plait of hair, are also in favour with Emma, though her notions in style have undergone some modification since she wrote her first English composition, which began, “I sit down to write an essay.” Emma is at present engaged upon writing a novel in letter form, modelled on Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet. That is a secret. Emma has many secrets. New-fashioned girls are said to have none.
Never believe it!
Perhaps the old-fashioned girl is seen to least advantage in a new-fashioned school. The modern system of examination perplexes her. It was not quite a dunce, but merely a bewildered old-fashioned girl who wrote what follows in obedience to the injunction, “Comment on the grammatical peculiarity in the sentence—‘Cromwell was by far our remarkablest governor.’”
“Carlyle did not know better English, or perhaps he wanted to make a joke.”
Not that the old-fashioned girl is not sometimes a frank ignoramus. This must be allowed to be the case when she defines—I cite here from authentic documents—phenomenon as “a very bad-tempered person,” and emolument as “great flattery.”
In dialogue with the new-fashioned girl the old-fashioned girl does not always come off best, but once and again she scores, if only by the utterance of a bold paradox. Take the following.
“I wish,” said the new-fashioned girl, “I was dead.”
“You are always wishing something impossible, Evelyn,” answered the old-fashioned girl. “The moment you are dead you will be wishing you were alive.”
Paradox of a kind less mordant and less moribund is contained in the following, which I set down as the favourite exclamation of an old-fashioned girl born blind—
“Ah, I see it all now!”
Sometimes the sorrows of the old-fashioned girl are of a kind calculated to rouse the amusement of those who are of a newer fashion. This is surely the case in the matter of one Ada, who writes—
“I have contracted the miserable habit of writing short words backwards, putting ‘dab’ for ‘bad,’ and much more dreadful things than that. I feel that in writing my own name I write it backwards, and that it is only by happy accident that it reads all right. This comes from a game which we have been playing, and which consists of naming words that make sense spelt backwards. The boys like it (this will shock you), because of the word mad.”
Useless were it to tell this Ada that the word which “mad” spells backwards is one in which “the boys” may fairly take delight, meaning merely, as it does, “a bank to confine water.” The stricken Ada knows boys better.
Another innocent
(To be continued.)