I once knew and marveled at a young person who spent her languid existence idly lounging in a rocking-chair, eating candy, and reading novels, whilst her mother bustled about, provoking by her activity an occasional remonstrance from her indolent daughter.  “Do, ma, keep still,” she would say, with amiable wonder at ma’s notable ways.  This incarnation of sweet selfishness was hateful in my eyes, and I have often queried, in the twenty years which have passed since I saw her, what sort of woman she made.  As a girl she was vexatious, though no ripple of annoyance crossed the white brow, no frown obscured it, and no flurry of impatience ever tossed the yellow curls.  She had no aspirations which candy and a rocking-chair could not gratify.  It is not so with girls of a larger mind and greater vitality—­the girls, for instance, in our own neighborhood, whom we have known since they were babies.  Many of them feel very much dissatisfied with life, and do not hesitate to say so; and, strangely enough, the accident of a collegiate or common-school education makes little difference in their conclusions.

“To what end,” says the former, “have I studied hard, and widened my resources?  I might have been a society girl, and had a good time, and been married and settled sometime, without going just far enough to find out what pleasure there is in study, and then stopping short.”

I am quoting from what girls have said to me—­girls who have been graduated with distinction, and whose parents preferred that they should neither teach, nor paint, nor enter upon a profession, nor engage in any paid work.  Polished after the similitude of a palace, what should the daughters do except stay at home to cheer father and mother, play and sing in the twilight, read, shop, sew, visit, receive their friends, and be young women of elegant leisure?  If love, and love’s climax, the wedding march, follow soon upon a girl’s leaving school, she is taken out of the ranks of girlhood, and in accepting woman’s highest vocation, queenship in the kingdom of home, foregoes the ease of her girlish life and its peril of ennui and unhappiness together.  This, however, is the fate of the minority, and while young people continue, as thousands do, to dread beginning home life upon small means, it must so remain.

Education is not a fetich, though some who ought to know better regard it in that superstitious light.  No amount of school training, dissevered from religious culture and from that development of the heart and of the conscience without which intellectual wealth is poverty, will lift anybody, make anybody happier or better, or fit anybody for blithe living in this shadowy world.  I have no doubt that there are numbers of girls whose education, having made them objects of deep respect to their simple fathers and mothers, has also gone far to make the old home intolerable, the home ways distasteful, and the old people, alas! subjects of secret, deprecating scorn.  A girl has, indeed, eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when her eyes are opened in such wise that she is ashamed of her plain, honorable, old-fashioned parents, or, if not ashamed, is still willing to let them retire to the background while she shines in the front.