Emma prefers the sound of “his health was drank” to that of “his health was drunk.” Such archaisms as to pen for to write, and a braid of hair for a plait of hair, are also in favour with Emma, though her notions in style have undergone some modification since she wrote her first English composition, which began, “I sit down to write an essay.” Emma is at present engaged upon writing a novel in letter form, modelled on Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet. That is a secret. Emma has many secrets. New-fashioned girls are said to have none.
Never believe it!
Perhaps the old-fashioned girl is seen to least advantage in a new-fashioned school. The modern system of examination perplexes her. It was not quite a dunce, but merely a bewildered old-fashioned girl who wrote what follows in obedience to the injunction, “Comment on the grammatical peculiarity in the sentence—‘Cromwell was by far our remarkablest governor.’”
“Carlyle did not know better English, or perhaps he wanted to make a joke.”
Not that the old-fashioned girl is not sometimes a frank ignoramus. This must be allowed to be the case when she defines—I cite here from authentic documents—phenomenon as “a very bad-tempered person,” and emolument as “great flattery.”
In dialogue with the new-fashioned girl the old-fashioned girl does not always come off best, but once and again she scores, if only by the utterance of a bold paradox. Take the following.
“I wish,” said the new-fashioned girl, “I was dead.”
“You are always wishing something impossible, Evelyn,” answered the old-fashioned girl. “The moment you are dead you will be wishing you were alive.”
Paradox of a kind less mordant and less moribund is contained in the following, which I set down as the favourite exclamation of an old-fashioned girl born blind—
“Ah, I see it all now!”