This is the girl who sometimes lays herself open to the terrible charge levelled by a writer on the emotions at Sterne and Byron and others of the school of literature to which they belonged. Says Professor Bain, "Some of the sentimental writers, such as Sterne and Byron, seem to have had their capacities of tenderness excited only by ideal objects, and to have been very hard-hearted towards real persons."
This is the girl who said dolefully the other day, "Oh, yes, one meets heaps of men, but they don't propose!" Concerning which speech one can only say that it might with advantage have been left unmade.
This, finally, is the girl whose letters show up the untenability of Miss Bingley's rule, as set forth in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice.
"It is a rule with me"—so said Miss Bingley—"that a person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill."
The average sentimental girl can write a long letter with ease, and can write ill. In a long letter by such a girl which has been placed at my disposal, she constitutes herself petitioner for a poor family, of which she writes, "They are getting into despair as to how to meet their rent, much less food. It is a fearful idea of people in one's own class wanting for food." The sentiment of that is rather narrow, and the wording of it is execrable.
Tact is not always but is sometimes denied to the young sentimental letter-writer. "I have been reading"—so wrote some little time ago a girl to a novelist—"your last book, and have fallen in love with you, and now the thought has come into my head, 'Could not I collect together my feeble attempts at writing and publish them?'"
The writer who is informed that his work has suggested the collecting together of feeble attempts and publishing them is made the recipient of a dubious compliment.
Very often the inducement to do a thing as set forth by the girl-sentimentalist is of a kind not calculated to weigh strongly with persons less sentimental.
A lady of high accomplishments and keen relish of social intercourse asserts that while on the staff of a London High School she suffered for years from the invitations of young girls who, in imploring her to accept their family's hospitality, never failed to emphasise the fact that there would be "nobody else invited."
There is a very general idea that the girl-sentimentalist totally ignores the practical side of life. That is not so.