“But then the question is,” said Sissy, “whether we are so very much the better for having more tucks and flounces. (By the way, no one wears tucks now, mamma.) The good of a sewing machine is that it leaves one much more time for improving one’s mind.”
“In my day,” said Mrs. Witherington, going on with her private argument, “we had our things all made of fine linen, instead of the cotton you wear now, and trimmed with real lace instead of the cheap imitation trash that everybody has. We had not so much ornament, but what there was, was good. My wedding things were all trimmed with real Mechlin that broad—”
“That must have been very charming,” said Lady Mary; “but in the meantime we must settle about our work. Mr. Earnshaw is willing to give us an hour on Tuesdays. Should you all come? You must not undertake it, if it will interfere with other work.”
“Oh yes, I want to know German better,” said Sissy. “It would be very nice to be able to speak a little, especially if mamma goes abroad next summer as she promises. To know a language pretty well is so very useful.”
Lady Mary made a little gesture of despair with her pretty hands. “Oh, my dear girls,” she said, “how are you ever to be thoroughly educated if you go on thinking only of what’s useful, and to speak a little German when you go abroad? What is wanted is to make you think—to train your minds into good methods of work—to improve you altogether mentally, and give you the exactness of properly cultivated intellects; just the thing that we women never have.”
Myra was the only one who had courage enough to reply, which she did with such a good hearty ringing peal of laughter as betrayed Edgar out of the gravity becoming the situation. Myra thought Lady Mary’s address the best joke in the world.
CHAPTER XXI.
Wisdom and Foolishness.
“It is astonishing,” said Lady Mary, mournfully, “how entirely one is misunderstood in all one’s deeper meanings—even by those one has, so to speak, trained one’s self.”
“Yes,” said Edgar, hesitating, with the modesty that became his humble pretensions; “but, after all, to desire a piece of knowledge because it is useful, is not an unworthy sentiment.”
“Oh, no, not at all an unworthy sentiment; indeed, very right in its way; but totally subversive,” said Lady Mary, sadly, “of the highest principle of education, which aims at thorough cultivation of the mind rather than at conferring certain commonplace matter-of-fact acquirements. Considered in that point of view, professional education would be the highest, which I don’t think it is. Unless education is prized for itself, as a discipline of the mind, and not merely as teaching us some things we don’t know, we can never reach the highest level; and that truth, alas!” Lady Mary sighed, still more sadly, with all the disappointment of a baffled reformer, “women have not even begun to perceive. You laugh, Mr. Earnshaw, but, for my part, I cannot laugh.”