Yes could hardly be said in a mournfuller way, and the case of Miss In Her Teens to-day is only by so much more mournful than that of her prototype of Garrick’s day that when she says “Heigho” it as often as not means “No.”
Her cause of grief is what the moody girl is rarely able to state. There are people whom this surprises; yet there is nothing surprising in it. The lives of most pessimists, looked at closely, show these persons to have lived under fair advantages, and not, as they would make out, under unfair disadvantages. Many of them follow a process uncommonly like that followed by certain “sturdy beggars,” who, if rumour concerning them be true, rubbed their skins with blistering plants—wild ranunculus and the like—to cause sores which should excite sympathy. The moody girl is she who picks from life’s full garden wild ranunculus only, and puts it to a wicked use devised by “sturdy beggars.”
Has she no aspirations? In truth, she has no fewer than Ovid had, and, like Ovid, she might say, “I see and approve the better things; I follow the worse”—in Ovid’s language, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.
What is she like to look at? Lean as a rake? Not necessarily. Watts’ famous picture named “Aspirations” is the presentment of a fat-faced, woolly-haired boy. A moody girl known to me has nothing bodeful in her face, and has a little, plump, white hand—Napoleon’s hand. Her wail, too, is Napoleon’s: “Nothing is left to do!” Another has a round, troubleful little face with poco fatto—“little done”—written all over it. One moody girl only known to me looks the part she elects to play. This girl has a thin, pallid face, with thick, straight, black, moist, heavy hair. She says dreamily, and says often, “I know I’m disagreeable.” She says little more than that.
The moody girl has rarely a wide range of conversation. She is apt to end her most voluble narrative with a portentous “But however.” There is a moody girl now living who goes by the name of “But However.” Of another moody girl now living a tradition has it that she never speaks, except to ask, “Is there a letter for me?” Howbeit sometimes a moody girl can string twenty and odd words together, and there is on record a very notable statement in the form of a paradox once made by such a girl; to wit, this—
“When married I shall never know happiness until I have shown my husband that I am master, and then I shall be miserable because I shall despise him.”
Well-a-day!
This is the place perhaps in which to tell of the slaty-blue girl.
Figure to yourself a damsel in a slaty-blue dress and slaty-blue hat, wearing slaty-blue gloves, and having slaty-blue eyes and slaty-blue lips, and figure her to yourself as “footing slow,” to borrow a phase from Milton, and as doing this as one of a party of us making a rush for a train “already in.” And figure us seated in a third-class compartment, a little child in which is drawing his finger down the window-pane. To whom the slaty-blue girl says (as we phase it, “dyingly”) from the end of the seat—