But there is another side of it all, and term-time is “the children’s hour,” from one point of view.

Instead of the term being, for children, a time of self-denial, and the holidays, a time of well-earned self-indulgence,—­I feel that term-time means self-denial for the parents, and selfishness for the children.  Do not misunderstand me; the selfishness which I mean is forced upon you,—­it is your duty, in term-time, to put lessons first.  It may very well be that some of you feel you were wrongly selfish in your way of doing it,—­that you allowed school work and school interests to blind you to the helpful things you might have done at home without any injury to the lessons.  I occasionally hear such things as, that school is “so bad for girls, because So-and-so gets so engrossed with her work that she is irritable when any demand is made on her time, and is deep in her books when any demand is made on her sympathies; and when she is not studying, she and her school friends are running in and out of each other’s houses, so that her mother might as well have no daughter at all.”  I do beg that none of you will bring this discredit on school life, for the system gets blamed when it is really your individual shortcoming which is in fault; you ought to be big enough to hold both school and home interests!  But, setting aside this form of term-time selfishness, which we shall all agree to condemn, there remains another form of it, which is a duty.  You must put lessons first, or you will be wasting both your parents’ money and that leisure for self-improvement, which, as a rule, is only granted to us while we are young.  You are not free, yet, to be as useful at home as you would like to be; your mother has to do without a daughter, to a large extent, or to avail herself of one with the uncomfortable feeling that the daughter is losing valuable time thereby, and probably is considering herself a martyr in having to do unscholastic duties.  I dare say the daughter feels, “It isn’t to please myself that I slave at my lessons; mother would be vexed if I didn’t; and it’s very hard that I should be both hindered in them and made to do other things as well,—­it’s quite bad enough in term-time to have to fag at lessons.”  But just consider, for a moment, this “fagging at lessons:”  you feel that in so doing you are making a concession to your mother, for which she ought to show unbounded gratitude by all manner of sweetmeats in the holidays.  But who profits by these lessons,—­your mother, who denies herself many a small luxury to be able to pay for them, or you, who are being fitted by them to take a good place in after-life?  It seems to me that the gratitude and the sweatmeats ought to flow from you to her; I quite see the force of it, if any girl feels what I have just described,—­I flatter myself I generally do see the force of my victim’s complaints; but it does not do my victim much good, because I generally also see the force of something else, which is of superior importance, but which the victim, very likely, will not see till she is older.