The elder girl frowned at this indiscreet remark, and interrupted it with grave remonstrance, saying
"Hush, Edith! You shouldn't talk quite so plainly," then with a wonderful tact in one so young she lit up her face with a happy expression, appropriate to her change of subject, and asked:
"Where does Mrs. Hampden think of spending the summer, this year?"
I could vouch no information on this point, as, I had not troubled to put the question to my step-mother myself, and so, after relating to me in a somewhat confidential tone, all the plans and projects which her Mama and her Aunt Ada had arranged for their holiday season, and their strong temptation to try Riviere du Loup, where so many fashionable people were said to be retiring just then, she finally arose, and with an emphasized request that I would "run in" without the least ceremony, to see her at any time, she bowed herself most gracefully out of the room, followed by her younger and less sophisticated relative.
I need hardly say what turn the rising tide of my impressions and opinions took about this time. To one who had passed from the cheerless, loveless guardianship of a worldly step-mother, into the tender hands of patient and devoted sisters, to become, instead of a wandering, uncared for waif, the object of the truest and holiest solicitude that ever animated Christian hearts, this hollow mockery of fashionable life was nothing more than a matchless absurdity.
Had I grown up to this, in the unpropitious atmosphere of my own home, I daresay such phases of existence would have come upon me quite naturally, and without my ever stopping to question their real or relative solidity. But the "twig" had been differently inclined, by hands more worthy of training tender, susceptible off-shoots. Where can frail young innocence find a safe, secure and profitable refuge, from the destroying influence of evil, if not within convent walls? It is there, or nowhere, that girlhood, growing, aspiring girlhood, ripens into a glorious womanhood. There, go hand in hand the development of mind, and what is more necessary, if possible for a woman, the cultivation of heart. Everyone who looks about him in the social world, and gives a moment of calm consideration to what he sees and hears, cannot but admit, that though surrounded by a vast field for active and profitable labour, and with multiplied favours of circumstances thrown in their way, our girls lead comparatively useless lives, as if they were a recremental fraction of the human race, than which, indeed, many are no better, since they choose to lead such lives as can be fruitful of no direct benefit to themselves or their fellow-mortals.
It is not because a woman is excluded (rightly or not) from the more public arena of active life, that her energies need become paralyzed and wasted. It is not because the popular idea of propriety would deny her the right or opportunity to do great things for society or for the state, in the same way as men are expected to do them, that she cannot work her own great or little wonders in a quieter, but yet more direct manner.
It is acknowledged that hers is the mission of the heart; it is admitted that her sphere is in the family, and what is the mightiest commonwealth in the world, but a family of families. Ah me! It is a dark day with humankind when the sphere of a woman's action lies rigidly between her toilet table and the drawing-room.
The proof that such limits as these are both unlawful and unnatural, is, that our women who are confined within them, are conscious in their hearts of the wrong they are doing the world and themselves. Conscience is not yet an extinct, though it is fast becoming an unpopular and unfashionable faculty, and men and women play the Pharisee with a deep sense of their own worthlessness and littleness gnawing at their spirit all the while.
I had been taught all this in time, and as early as my first vacation at home, among the fashionable juveniles of my step-mother's circle, I had begun to submit my valuable precepts to profitable practice. My first callers taught me a very wholesome lesson which I have held upon the surface of my memory through all these years.