Again, there is some school talk which is undesirable, though not wrong.  I mean talk about the things which belong to your future life, but which are just the sides of it that you want your education to help you to keep in proper proportion.  There are interests, such as hunting and dancing, which are all right in their own time and place, but which make a silly, empty mind when they are your chief mental food.  You come to school to take an interest in work, and in bookish things generally.  It is not so easy to do this when you are in the full swing of home amusements, and so you come away for a sort of mental retreat, during which it will be easier to you to let your bookish and thoughtful side grow.  Here you are, and your home amusements are left behind.  Would it not be a pity to let your mind keep running on the very things from which you have come away?  Do not let your tongue or your mind run on the amusements of home—­they prevent your taking real interest in your work.

Also there should be no talk about religious differences.  Of course, you all come from different homes and have somewhat different teaching, and I do not wish you ever to discuss those differences.  Every one should keep to her home ways, and try to live up to them.  Religious controversy never yet made any into better Christians, and it generally makes them worse!

Avoid Religious gossip about the services and the clergy.  Make it a rule for yourself, wherever you are, never to criticize the clergyman or the sermon.  Very likely you might say something to the point—­it might do him good if he heard it!  That will not happen, and what will happen is, that you will do yourself harm by being critical or amused, instead of making your mind devout.  If your “mind” knows that, whatever it may notice in church, your “will” is not going to allow it to speak of, then your critical part goes to sleep.  A joke loses its amusingness if one is not going to tell it, and you are then able to think only of your Prayers and Resolutions.

Purity and Reverence are the two main things in talk, but how about Sense?

There is one class of girl I have sometimes noticed with amused regret—­I dare say you have too—­though she is by no means so objectionable as the other kind I spoke of.  She is a would-be child of nature.  She has no thoughtfulness or weight about her; she is an engaging kitten who exists on the rather inadequate stock-in-trade of nice eyes; she is quite irresponsible and useless, and tells you so, in an ingenuous way, for which her nearest and dearest long to box her ears!  I would call her “The Artless Japanese,” remembering the princess in the Mikado, who says, “I sit and wonder, in my artless Japanese way, why I am so charming.”

Again, very often a girl of your age gets a good deal of society in the holidays or before she comes.  She comes to school on purpose to keep away from that, till the right time for it comes (when I hope she will have plenty of it!)