Let your time-table be a secret hair shirt, and not a red rag flaunted in your family’s face.  But never give up reading and thinking, the keeping in touch with abstract ideas.  As long as you are young you can get on without this, but, when the charm of youth deserts you, you will find life (and others will find you) a blessing or a curse, according as you have developed or starved your powers of mind.  It may be that you find little pleasure in your steady reading, and see no immediate results from it; never mind, read on, lest you become in middle life one of those amiable, empty-headed women who can give neither help, nor comfort, nor advice, worth the taking.  How many old maids, and young maids too, tied by home duties, allowed their minds to get thin and empty:  when, at last, they were set free they were silly and inconsequent; no work requiring thought and insight could be entrusted to them.

The second difficulty which is felt by many comes from the new lights of the day.  At school, girls come in contact with varied ideals and inspirations,—­they drink new wine, and they go home to find that old bottles are still used there.  Very often this difficulty is greater in proportion as a girl has rightly profited by school—­in proportion as she has been teachable and ready to assimilate good; she goes home with new aspirations to be met by old prejudices—­prejudices intensified by half-loving jealousy of the alien influences of school.  Are you to shut your eyes to the new lights, and be as though you had never known them?  No, but do not keep one Commandment by breaking another.  The First Commandment is supreme, Thou shall have none other gods but Him Who is the Truth; Truth must be obeyed at all costs, but if your truth-seeking breaks the Fifth Commandment, it probably breaks the Second also, and the principle you are obeying will turn out to be a graven image of God, and not the voice of God Himself.  Very grave doubt rests on any form of goodness which is in opposition to your mother; it may be good for others, but can scarcely be so for you.  I know of a girl who got under High Church influence at school, and who, in pursuit of spiritual good, gets surreptitious High Church books and newspapers, under cover to a friend.  Another got under Low Church influence, and refuses to please her mother by dressing prettily or going out.  It seems to me that both girls read their lesson backwards and neglect the weightier matters of the law, truth, and obedience,—­while they seek what is good in itself but not good for them.  Others persist in going to a church their mother disapproves of,—­they say they can get good at a musical church, and only irritation and harm by going with her.  I feel heartily for the trial of going to a church they dislike, but surely conquering self or pleasing a mother is good in itself, quite apart from the help given by the service; while, as to the good derived from the musical church under those circumstances, I doubt much if it comes down from the Father Who gave us the Fifth Commandment.