Bacon, when he made a new start as Solicitor-General, made a survey of his life, past and future, his faults and blunders, his strong and weak points, his hopes, the books he meant to read and to write, the friends he wished to make.  I am sure that thinking over our own lives as a whole would strengthen and guide us.  We rush into action and fight our best, but we do not make a plan of the campaign, and thus much of our energy is wasted by misdirected effort; and, in leaving a school-life of rule and regularity, you will be much tempted to slip through the day without the safeguard of a life of Rule; but, until you are the saints you are called to be, you cannot afford to do without this help.  We must remember the warning of St. Francis de Sales against playing at being angels before we are men and women.

On the other hand, you will need to guard against the temptation to make your rules unbending and inconsiderate, to follow your ideal, heedless of the fact that you thereby become tiresome to your people.  How often the home people feel jealous of school, and say it has cut a girl off from her home interests, that she comes back full of outside friendships and interests and new principles.  Of course she does; if not, what good would school have done her?  But she ought to feel how natural and how loving is this (often unexpressed) jealousy, and, by sympathetic tact, to avoid rousing it, and not to be always thrusting school interests down home throats.  The duty of a life of rule at home is all the more complex because home pleasures are duties too; if it was only a question of self-denial it would be plain sailing, but your mother likes you to go out, and your brothers want you, and if you refuse to enjoy yourself it hurts them:  if you even betray that you would rather be doing something else, you spoil their pleasure, for a “martyr” to home duty is a most depressing sight to gods and men.  And the complexity lies in the fact that you enjoy going, and conscience pricks you every now and then because you never read, and you seem to go through the day in a slipshod way, with no definite rule,—­no daily cross-bearing, no self-restraint to give salt to the day.  At school you have a definite duty of self-improvement set before you, and everything urges you to follow it.  This remains a duty when you go home, but it is very hard to reconcile it with the many things that clash—­not the least of these being our own laziness when the help of external pressure is taken away.  You have had intellectual advantages, and you will be downright sinful if you fritter all your time away over flowers and tennis, and never read because you do not like to be thought unsociable:  you are bound to improve your talents, but take it as your motto, that rules should be iron when they clash with our own wishes, and wax when they clash with those of others.