Most of these specific counsels I set down more for your entertainment than truly to guide you. You don't live by maxims any more than you speak by rules of grammar. You will speak by ear (improving, I hope, in your college environment), and you will live by whatever light there is in you, getting more, I hope, as you go along.
Grow in grace, my son! If your spirit is right, the details of life will take care of their own adjustment. Go to church; if not invariably, then variably. They don't require it any more in college, but you can't afford not to; for the churches reflect and recall—very imperfectly to be sure—the religion and the spirit of Christ; and on that the whole of our civilization rests. Get understanding of that. It is by far the most important knowledge in the whole book, the great fountain of sanity, tolerance, and political and social wisdom, a gateway to all kinds of truth, a rectifying and consoling current through all of life.
Intensive Living
By Cornelia A. P. Comer
SAID Honoria casually,—
'When I was in town yesterday, I went to see Adelaide in her new house.'
The others looked up alertly, Martha from her darning, Grace from her Irish crochet.
'Oh, really? And how did you like the house?'
Honoria hesitated, looking to the wide view for clarification. The three sat on a cottage veranda in the foothills of Southern California, one February day. In front of them the landscape ran, laughing, down-hill to the sea. Spread beneath them like a map were thirty miles of town and country: orange orchards brave with fruit; eucalyptus groves appealing to the sky; friendly roofs inclosed in deep-sheltering trees; great open spaces where the wind moved free; round-topped hills, green near at hand (for the rains had come and gone thus early), changing to a dusky blue out yonder where the bright Pacific flashed at the end of the long, delightful view. For love of this prospect Martha had lately left steep, sturdy hills, brown brooks, elm-shaded streets and old friends, girding at herself as she did so. Honoria had lived here many years, while Grace was but a winter's guest in Honoria's home, whose hospitable brown gables, low and wide-spreading, were visible beyond the cypress hedge encircling Martha's cottage.
'It is a good-looking mansion. She had a capable architect. The building is Tudor,—consistent, graceful, well proportioned. For two people it is a very large house indeed, but it is a good house, and I see perfectly how Adelaide means it to express the idea of dignified, comfortable living. The decorator was not bad of his kind, either.'