“This is my seventeenth birthday, and the date of my martyrdom. Mother insists that at last I must have my hair ‘done up woman fashion.’ She says she can hardly forgive herself for letting me ‘run wild’ so long. We had a great time over it all, and here I sit, like another Samson, ‘shorn of my strength.’ That figure won’t do, though, for the greatest trouble with me is that I never shall be shorn again! My ‘back hair’ is twisted up like a corkscrew; I carry eighteen hair-pins; my head aches, my feet are entangled in the skirt of my new gown. I can never jump over a fence again so long as I live. As for chasing the sheep down in the shady pasture, it’s out of the question, and to climb to my ‘Eagle’s Nest’ seat in the big burr oak would ruin this new frock beyond repair. Altogether, I recognize the fact that ‘my occupation’s gone.’”
My readers smile at this, but they may be assured there are such blots upon the page where it was written, as briny drops alone can make.
You see, dear friends, from this contrast I have drawn, showing a glimpse of past and future in two eager, young lives, how fast this world is getting on. What is the difference in the outlook of your life that is, and mine that used to be? Let us consider: I was a daring sort of girl; you are the sort of girls who dare. I had aspiration; you have opportunity. I breathed an atmosphere laden with old time conservatisms, from which my glorious mother’s liberality of soul was my one safety valve of deliverance. But you are exhilarated by the vital air of a new liberty. “The world is all before you, where to choose.” If I required but little of myself, it was because the world required so little of me. No college of first rank in east or west—save noble old Oberlin and generous Antioch—could have been coaxed to count me in when she made up her jewels. Briefly, public opinion proposes to give you a chance. It proposed to let me shirk for myself. It means to put a shield in your left hand and a sword in your right. It let me go forth, as best I could, to beat the air with unarmed hands, or to sharpen my weapons on the field and in plain sight of the enemy.
Society set before me very few incentives, and commended to me only the passive virtues. Indeed, she never really bestirred herself on my behalf at all, save that she ceased not in story and poem, by sermon and song by precept and example, and (most cogently of all) by setting no other hope before me to ground me, so far as she was able, in the philosophy that sustained the illustrious Micawber. “Now my daughter,” thus was she wont to speak, “do you but be docile and obedient, as a young woman should, and something, something very particular indeed will most assuredly turn up.”
But I learned early to distrust a Mentor who took so little cognizance of the imperious ardor of my youth; who was so stupidly oblivious of the varied possibilities in brain and hand and heart, and so I began early to follow out my own devices as to a plan of character and work. Would that the generous impulse of your enthusiasm, guided by your broader opportunity, might
“Give me back the wild pulsation
That I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me,
And the tumult of my life.”
More anon.