Now too, she begins to speak to her mother on more equal terms; to criticize her dress, and to make her understand that she considers her old-fashioned and inclined to be dowdy. She ties her bonnet-strings for her; arranges her cap; smartens up her old dress and compels her to buy a new one; and, while considering her immeasurably ancient, likes her to look nice, and thinks her in her own way beautiful. Sometimes she opposes and quarrels with her, if the mother has less tact than arbitrariness. But this is not her natural state; for one of the characteristics of Sweet Seventeen is her love for her mother and her need of better counsel and guidance; so that if she comes into opposition with her it is only through extreme pain, and the bitter teaching of tyranny and injustice. This is just the age indeed, when the mother's influence is everything to a girl; and when a silly, an unjust, or an unprincipled woman is the very ruin of her life. But with a low or evil-natured mother we seldom see a Sweet Seventeen worth the trouble of writing about: which shows at least one thing—the importance of the womanly influence at such a time, and how so much that we blame in our modern girls lies to the account of their mothers.
Great tact is required with Sweet Seventeen in such society as is allowed her; care to bring her out a little without obtruding her on the world, without making her forward and consequential, and without attracting too much attention to her. She is no longer a child to be shut away in the nursery, but she is not yet entitled to the place and consideration of a member of society. And yet it would be cruel to debar her wholly from all that is going on in the house. To be sure there is the governess, as well as mamma, to look after her manners and to give her rope enough and not too much; but by the time a girl is seventeen a governess has ceased to be the autocrat ex officio, and she obeys her or not according to their respective strengths. Still, the governess or mamma is for the most part at her elbow; and Sweet Seventeen, if well brought up, is left very little to her own guidance, and sees the world only through half-opened doors.
Girls of this age are often wonderfully sad, and full of a kind of wondering despair at the sin and misery they are beginning to learn. They take up extreme views in religion and talk largely on the nothingness of pleasure and the emptiness of the world; and many fair young creatures whom their elders, laden with sorrowful experience, think full of hope and joy, are ready to give up all the pleasure of life, and to lay down life itself, for very disgust of that of which they know nothing. They delight in sorrowful lamentations and sentimental regrets put into rhyme; and one of the funniest things in the world is to see a girl dancing with the merriest in the evening, and to hear her talking broken-hearted pessimism in the morning. It is merely an example of the old proverb about the meeting of extremes; vacuity leading to the same results as experience.
But however she takes this unknown life, it is always in an unreal and romantic aspect. Some of more robust mind delight in the bolder stories of Greece and Rome, and wish they had played a part in the sensational heroism of those grand old times; while others go to Venice, and make pictures for themselves out of the gliding gondolas and the mysterious Council of Ten, the lovely ladies with grim old fathers and high-handed brothers acting as gaolers, and the handsome cavaliers serenading them in the moonlight. That is their idea of love. They have no perception of anything warmer. It is all romance and poetry, and tender glances from afar, and long and patient wooing under difficulties and a little danger, with scarce a word spoken, and nothing more expressive than a flower furtively given, or a fleeting pressure of the finger tips. They know nothing else and expect nothing else. Their cherry is without stone, their bird without bone, their orange without rind, as in the old song; and they imagine a love as unreal as all the rest.
When thrown into actualities, though—say when left motherless, and the eldest girl of perhaps a large family with a father to comfort and a young brood to see after—Sweet Seventeen is often very beautiful in her degree, and rises grandly to her position. Sometimes the burden of her responsibilities is too much for her tender shoulders, and she is overweighted, and fails. Sometimes too she is tyrannical and selfish in such a position, and uses her power ill; and sometimes she is careless and good-humoured, when they all scramble up together, through confusion, dirt and disorder, till the close time is over, and they scatter themselves abroad. Sometimes she is a martyr, and makes herself and every one else uncomfortable by the perpetual demonstration of her martyrdom, and how she considers herself sacrificed and put upon. Indeed she is not unfrequently a martyr from other causes than heavy duties, being fond of adopting unworkable views which cannot run in the family groove anyhow. If she falls upon this rock she is in her glory; youth being marvellously proud of voluntary crucifixion, and thinking itself especially ill-used because it must be made conformable and is prevented from making itself ridiculous.
But Sweet Seventeen is intolerant of all moral differences. What she holds to be right is the absolute, the one sole and only just law; and she thinks it tampering with sin to allow that any one else has an equal right with herself to a contrary opinion. But on the whole she is a pleasant, loveable interesting creature; and one's greatest regret about her is that she is so often in the hands of unsuitable guides, and that her powers and noble impulses get so stunted and shadowed by the commonplace training which is her general lot, and the low aims of life which are the only ones held out to her.
THE HABIT OF FEAR.
The mind, like the body, contracts tricks and habits which in time become automatic and involuntary—habits of association, tricks of repetition, of which the excess is monomania, but which, without attaining to quite that extreme, become more or less masters of the brain and directors of the thoughts. And, of all these tricks of the mind, the habit of fear is the most insidious and persistent. It is seldom that any one who has once given in to it is able to clear himself of it again. However unreasonable it may be, the trick clings, and it would take an exceptionally strong intellect to be convinced of its folly and learn the courage of common-sense. But this is just the intellect which does not allow itself to contract the habit in the beginning; a coward being for the most part a washy, weak kind of being, with very little backbone anyhow. We do not mean by this fear that which is physical and personal only, though this is generally the sole idea which people have of the word; but moral and mental cowardice as well. Personal fear indeed, is common enough, and as pitiable as it is common; and we are ashamed to say that it is not confined to women, though naturally it is more predominant with them than with men.