Miss Morton smiled, as she looked at Amy's sweet face, and listened to her peculiarly ladylike pronunciation, and thought how impossible it would be for her to appear anything but a lady.
"Oh!" said Miss Cunningham, "it is quite out of the question for people who live always in the country to understand what things are proper and fashionable, and what are not. I should never have known myself if my aunt had not told me; and of course she knows, because she goes out constantly in London."
"Really," said Julia, satirically, "that quite surprises me; but then I am very ignorant, I have never even been in London."
"Do you think I shall ever learn to be fashionable?" asked Amy of Miss
Morton.
"I hope not," said Emily, regardless of Miss Cunningham's contemptuous smile.
"Why?" asked Margaret, "do you not wish her to be ladylike?"
"Yes," replied Emily; "but it does not follow that to be ladylike it is necessary to be fashionable. A fashionable manner is a manner put on; a really ladylike manner arises from a really ladylike mind—one is sincere, the other generally is affected; and when persons strive to be fashionable, they often end in becoming vulgar."
"Then what do you think we should try to be?" asked Mary Warner.
"Nothing," replied Emily; "those who possess a cultivated mind, and a gentle, humble disposition, need not try to be anything; they may be quite sure of not being vulgar; and as for being elegant and graceful, they will never become so by thinking about it; the very endeavour must make them constrained."
"But I should so like to be elegant," said Margaret.