A girl’s idea of usefulness.
A girl’s thoughts of usefulness sometimes begin a very long way off. They appear to her at a distance, as if she were looking through the small end of a telescope. “The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and the girl’s idea of usefulness is to nurse the sick and wounded in war-time, to go out as a missionary among the heathen, to write books with great thoughts in them, to do noble deeds of tremendous self-sacrifice, to take up some great life-work. She looks so far afield that she cannot see the little duties lying to her hand, in the performance of which lies her best training for great and worthy deeds. Many a girl dreams of such an ideal as Florence Nightingale, and nevertheless shrieks and runs out of the room when her little brother cuts his hand with the carving-knife. What a scared, helpless creature she would be in a hospital! Another girl pictures herself a heroine of self-denial, giving up “all” for some one, while she is too lazy to run upstairs to fetch her mother’s gloves, or too self-indulgent to read the money article in The Times to her father. She is not “faithful in small things,” though she fully intends to excel in great. The ideal daughter.The ideal daughter is the unselfish, active, intelligent, and good-tempered girl, who thinks out what she can do to help her mother, to make life pleasanter for her father, and home happier for her brothers.
True self-culture.
Many girls think self-culture the first and greatest duty of all, but in thinking so, and in acting on the thought, they turn their backs upon real self-culture. Doing something for others, when we would rather be doing something for ourselves, goes further towards self-culture, in its highest and best sense, than reading the cleverest book ever written, or practising the most difficult music. There have been girls who, thinking it their duty, have refused to leave their parents, even to marry the man they love. This is usually a mistaken notion of “fais ce que dois,” for it throws on the father and mother a terrible weight of obligation, never to be paid off, and even if they know nothing of the sacrifice at the time it is made, it is certain to come home to them sooner or later. Is it not Ruskin who declares that self-denial, when it is carried beyond the boundary of common sense, becomes an actual injury against those for whom it is practised? There is a deep truth in this.
About unselfishness.
Youth is not naturally self-denying. Human nature is strongly selfish, and when girls are young they have had little chance to oppose the strength of this inherent quality. Some girls, however, are much less selfish than others, while some are utterly spoilt! A doting mother is nothing more nor less than a selfish mother, who, to please herself, allows her daughter’s faults to grow up unchecked. She fears to be firm, lest she should lose some of the affection she prizes. Could she only know that the child, at a very early age, is distinctly aware of this weakness and despises it, she would plainly see the awful mistake she is making. Children love best the mothers who are both firm and gentle. By a sort of instinct the young ones seem to be aware of the true selflessness that actuates the parent who battles with their early faults. It is not the foolishly indulgent mothers who win the warmest love from their girls. It is those who can temper justice with love. Girls soon know whether the mother is swayed by selfishness or actuated by principle, and, with very few exceptions, they follow in her steps.
The home training.
Could some of the happy lovers and happy husbands look back through the years at the long and patient training, the loving care, that has resulted in the complete realisation of their brightest dreams—“My queen! my queen!”—they would find in them a guarantee for the future. Girls who have not been spoiled by over-indulgence, and who have been taught to take a sane, calm, rational view of all life’s circumstances, are the best helpmeets that man can have. Such an one is a delightful companion, with her cultivated mind and her ready sympathies. She can enter into his outside troubles in the battle of life, and there is a fibre of strength in her on which he may safely lean in the day of disaster, should it come.