Mary is still influenced by the words of her father; he once said to her, "Mary, can you not arrange your hair as other girls do? those long curls are too childish at your age."
From this moment, to her mother's great regret, she, as it was then called, "turned up her hair" in the way we have described.
Her aunts approved, because this arrangement was less singular and more fashionable, which latter fact would have greatly surprised Mr. Armstrong. At all events, they differed from him in one respect still. When the rebellious hair would escape from the plaits in stray ringlets while in the company of her aunts, Mary had at first attempted to reduce them to submission, but she was quickly interrupted. "Leave your hair alone, Mary," her aunt Herbert exclaimed; "why, those stray ringlets are most effective, and quite an improvement to the appearance of your head. Surely your father will not object to what is natural; if you curled it in paper every night to produce an effect, then he might complain or disapprove."
Mary laughed, but when visiting at her aunt's she allowed Nature to act as she pleased. Yet at home there seemed no happier task to the young girl than to give way to every wish of her father, whether openly expressed or slightly hinted at, no matter to what it referred. It was a kind of hero-worship in the girl's heart. Her father was her hero, and the fact that she did not love him with the same clinging fondness as she loved her mother was quite unknown to herself.
Mary Armstrong certainly obeyed the command, "Honour thy father and thy mother;" yet in the family at Lime Grove there was still one thing wanting, "the perfect love that casteth out fear."
The principles of honour, rectitude, truthfulness, generosity, and other moral virtues were cultivated in Mary's home, but the "charity, or love," without which, St. Paul tells us, all our doings are as "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals," was wanting. Love to God and love to man, on which "hang all the law and the commandments," were known only in theory.
Mary Armstrong had yet to learn that to her Father in heaven she must turn in trouble and sorrow, and in future days she might have said almost in the words of Wolsey, "Had I but served my Father in heaven as diligently as I studied to please my father on earth, He would not have forsaken me now in my hour of sorrow." And yet for these days of trial Mary at last could feel thankful. Christianity in her home had been an acknowledged fact. Its outward duties, its moral principles, were all inculcated; but when our daily life passes smoothly, untroubled, by sorrow or poverty, which is, perhaps, the hardest trial of all to bear, especially when accompanied by sickness and pain, we are apt to forget the sweet principle of love to God and love to man which, St. Paul tells us, "is the fulfilling of the law;" and Mary Armstrong's life hitherto had known no trials more painful than those caused by her father's eccentricities.