Never have the blood-guiltiness on your head of teaching evil to others, or leading their minds to dwell on it.  Some find it much harder to get rid of such thoughts than others do—­they may be more naturally inclined to it, and you may have woke up in them far more harm than you guess.

Your very first duty when you are thrown with others is to see that no one shall ever be less nice-minded because they knew you.  See to it that no one learns anything about evil through your being with them.  You can very easily soil a mind, and you can never wash it clean.

If you feel the least doubt about a thing, do not say it—­do not tell the story; if you want to ask a question and feel in the very least uncomfortable about it, hold your tongue, or ask your mother instead.

There are many things which it is not wholesome to talk about among yourselves, but which it is quite right to ask your mother about, or any one in her place, if you find yourself dwelling on them.  Of course this includes everything which makes you feel at all hot, with a sense of something not quite nice;—­everything in books which it would make you hot to read out loud (an excellent test);—­and I include all uncanny things such as ghosts and palmistry and fortune-telling:—­these are not safe things to talk about, and I ask you as my particular wish not to do it, though you are quite welcome to unburden your mind to me if you wish to do so!  I think your common sense will bear me out in not wanting them talked about among yourselves, because you never know who may take it seriously or what harm you may be doing, though as I have read “The Mysteries of Udolpho” to you, you will see that it is not the subject, but the indiscriminate talking which I object to!

But apart from wrong talk, what sort of silly talk are you likely to be infected with at school?  It is not unlikely that among a number of girls there will be one with a hawk’s eye for dress, who knows exactly how a trimming went, and how long this or that has been worn; in fact, she takes in every detail of the dress of each person she sees for a minute, and can talk of it by the hour!  She may have no harm in her, but she is first cousin to a milliner’s apprentice (and is mentally the poor relation of the two, since the milliner notices these things as a part of business, and very likely has other interests in life for her spare time).  If the girl wishes to prove herself of different family, she needs to put to sleep the side of her that belongs to the keen-eyed young lady behind the counter, by feeding other sides of her mind, and turning her powers of observation on to other things.

I should like you to be faultlessly dressed outside, and I should like you to be perfectly well inside; but I should not admire you if your chief subject of conversation was the devices by which you arrived at the dress, or the decoctions you took to arrive at the health.