Copy the flowers of the field, not only in prettiness, but in giving an impression that you grow as naturally as they do!  Make us feel that you could not have anything ugly or awkward or unbecoming about you.  Your dress and your rooms and your dinners should be perfect, but do not entertain your guest with the mere mechanism of how you arrive at any one of them.  Give time and thought to this machinery of life—­enough to produce the right result, and then go on to the real interests, for which they are only the stage.  I do not want a sloven, but I want a girl who is a real person and not a mere poupee modele to show off dresses.

Petty gossip is the prevailing danger of any small community such as a girls’ school.  Provincial gossip, Matthew Arnold would call it—­provincial being one of his severest adjectives for the Philistines whom his soul abhors,—­by which he means that their talk is limited to their narrow-minded local gossip, so that when a stranger comes from a larger world, they have nothing in common.  I think his use of that word marks his French turn of mind;—­parochial would be the better expression in England, where the talk is very often literally parochial,—­besides deserving the word in its wider meaning, as describing talk which is full of unimportant, local, and personal facts, instead of belonging to the larger world of ideas.

English girls, as a whole, are supposed to be bad at talking—­to giggle among themselves, and to have nothing to say on general subjects.  But, besides this, there is a certain love of silly mysteries and secrets in some girls, which is apt to be too much for their common sense.

Some girls are so keen to chatter, and make themselves interesting at any cost, that they tell their family’s private affairs or discuss the faults of their nearest relations.  I am sure you would all remember that any one, with a grain of decent family pride, washes every bit of dirty linen at home, and holds their tongue about family news till they are sure it is public property, and to the family credit!  If you ever want to talk about such things for real reasons, always go to an older friend and not to one of your own age; for an older friend would know enough of the world to take it up by the right handle and to hold her tongue.

Again, some girls fancy that a little theatre gossip marks them out as women of the world.  To talk about a play and about the good and bad strokes of acting is one thing:—­the petty personal gossip about the actors and actresses is on the same level, to my mind, as the talking about dukes and duchesses by those who read of them in a society paper, without ever expecting to meet them.