Chapter 2

There is no denying that there is great temptation to violent admirations and attractions in school. In the first place, in school or college the girl is brought into contact with a large circle of people who are immensely interesting to her. The whole atmosphere is full of novelty, of the unusual. Some of the students and teachers whom she meets for the first time represent a broader experience, it may be, than her own home life has given her. They are often new types and new types are always interesting.

I shall say nothing of the idealism of friendship--it plays its part in other books. It would seem sometimes as if almost too much emphasis had been placed upon the making of friendships in school,--friendship which is, after all, but a by-product, the most valuable it is true, nevertheless a by-product of the life. Wholly practical are the tests of friendship which I shall give. In the first place a friend is too absorbing who takes all of one's interest to the exclusion of everything else: there should be interest in other people, other activities as well as in one's work. Such a friendship can only make a girl forget for what she has come to school. The new relation which disposes one to look with less respect and affection upon one's own people and home--and they, be it remembered, have stood the most valuable test of all, the test of time--cannot be a good influence. It may be said in general that an association which is developing the less fine traits in one's character, giving emphasis to the less worthy sides, should be relinquished immediately, even at the cost of much heartache. The heartache will be only temporary; the bad influence might become permanent. On the other hand, since friendship is giving as well as taking, one does well to consider the fact that if one's own part in it does not tell for good, there is just as much reason for stopping the friendship where it is. Some of these associations--and this is a hard saying, I know--which seem everything at the time are nothing, as the years will prove. A girl idealizes, and idealizes those who are not worthy. Inevitably the day comes when she laughs at herself,--if she does not do worse and pity herself for having been such a goose.

Only a few of the friendships made in school are destined to endure. One of the foremost of those that last is founded on similarity of interest. Perhaps it is the girl with whom one has worked side by side in the laboratory,--a relation formed slowly and on a permanent basis. Many of the best of friends have come together through community of interests, and this is a type of friendship for which men have a greater gift than women.

There is still another type which develops because of some conspicuously noble or fine quality which proves attractive. Hero worship, this, which enlarges one's self through the admiration given to another. Then there is the friendship based on a purely personal attraction, with mutual respect and self-respect as its dedicated corner-stone. This does not mean that one cannot see any faults in the friend, or know that one's own are seen, without losing affection. There is always something flimsy and insecure about a friendship that simply idealizes. Any relation should be all the stronger for a frank acknowledgment of its imperfections. If a girl cares enough she will be willing to admit her own faults and wish to make herself more worthy to be a friend.

And, finally, there is what might be called the lend-a-hand friendship,--the relation that springs into existence because of the need which is seen in another. It is not fair to make a packhorse of one's friend or to turn one's self into the leaning variety of plant, but it is fair and wise and right, if one is strong enough to accomplish the end in view, to lend a hand to another girl who is not making the best of herself.

Have a good time but do not swear eternal allegiance in this first year to anybody, however wonderful she may seem. Hold yourself in reserve, if for no other reason, then on account of the old friends at home, whether they be kin or no-kin, for they have been true. And remember, as I have said before, friendship is like scholarship and must by its nature come slowly.

IV

THE STUDENT'S ROOM

There has been a general improvement in student rooms, yet many rooms to-day have altogether too much in them: too many pictures, too many banners, too much furniture, too many hangings. The great fault of most rooms is this overcrowding. If we were only heroic enough to make a bonfire of nine-tenths of all they contain we should see suddenly revealed possibilities for something like the ideal room.

One serious and obvious objection to the overcrowding of rooms is the hygienic. I am tempted to say that this is the most important objection: indeed, since health is more important than wealth, I will say so. A girl has neither the time nor the ability to keep so many articles in a room clean: and while she is busy attending to her studies, some cherished ornaments are not only laying up dust for the future, as a more regenerate life will lay up treasures, but also breeding germs, perhaps collecting the very germs which will take this girl away from school or college. Besides, bric-à-brac not only gathers dust and breeds germs but also wearies the nerves. It makes one tired to see so many things about, and tired to be held responsible for them. Without realizing it, we resist the amount of space they occupy and in their place want the air and sunshine. Subconsciously, most of us long to get rid of our bric-à-brac and then pull down the draperies that keep out the sunlight. The simpler the window draperies in a room, the more easily washed, the better and more attractive. For wholesome attractiveness there is no fabric that can excel a flood of warm sunshine. Any girl or woman who has curtains which she must protect from strong light by drawing down the shades is guilty of a household sin whose greatness she cannot know. That same sunshine, freely admitted, will do more to cleanse a house than all the soap, all the brooms, and even all the vacuum cleaners ever invented.

The so-called beauty of a room should always give way before the hygiene of a room. Not only should the room be sensibly furnished so that it may have plenty of air and light, but closets should not contain articles of furniture which belong where the air can reach them. There is a difference between a room that is not orderly and one that is not clean. A room that contains unclean articles in drawers or closets, unclean floors, unclean rugs and hangings and unclean walls, should not be tolerated for an instant. If a girl turns a combination bedroom and study in school or college into a kitchen, if an ice-cream freezer occupies all the foreground of this place she calls home, and chafing-dishes with cream bottles, sardine tins, cracker boxes, paper bags full of stale biscuits, fruit skins, dish-cloths and grease-spotted walls, all the background, it is impossible to have a clean room to live in.

The Golden Rule applies to rooms as well as to human beings and should read, "Do unto a room as you would it should do unto you." And not only for the sake of health should this Golden Rule for Rooms be observed but also for the sake of the college or school. The room that belongs to us only for a time should be as thoughtfully cared for as if it were our own personal property. There is something inconsistent, isn't there, in educating a girl in high thinking and fine ideals, if she is willing to live in a room that for uncleanliness many a woman in some crowded quarter of a city would consider a disgrace? Such contradiction in mind and surrounding is out of harmony with all one's ideal for a gentlewoman.

Not only beauty is restful, peace-giving and peace-bringing, but so, also, are neatness and order. Orderliness helps to fit one for work. There is undoubtedly some connection between surroundings and one's mental state. In themselves disorder and confusion are irritating. The sight of a dirty child crying in the doorway of an untidy house suggests some connection between the wretchedness of the child and the squalor of the home. I often think of William Morris, the great craftsman and charming poet, who had much at heart the happiness of all people, especially the poor, and his exclamation, "My eye, how I do love tidiness!" To him, to the artist, it was, as it is, beautiful. George Eliot had to put even the pins in her cushion into some neat arrangement before she could sit down to write. Disorder wastes not only one's feelings and health, it also wastes one's time, for a lot of this commodity may be lost in looking for books, wraps, gloves and other things which are not put away properly.

School ought to be a training for the life afterwards. That is why we go to school, isn't it? Why should a girl indulge herself in habits which will make against her usefulness in the life of the home or in whatever circumstance she may be? There is a certain disciplinary value in order. Every great military school has recognized this. Laxness in the care of one's room may mean the habit of laxness in other and more important ways. Disorderliness indicates a certain tendency in character, and if a girl allows that sort of thing to go on she is very likely to show it in other ways. Untidiness in any of one's personal habits--and what could be more personal than a room?--should be taken up and corrected even as one attempts to correct any weak point in one's character.

Do you know what is always--that is, if it is in it at all--the most beautiful thing in a room? It is something which the Creator meant all mankind should have, rich and poor, old and young alike; it is something beyond the buying price of any wealth. It is the sunshine, more beautiful, more valuable than expensive hangings that shut it out. Perhaps it is partly because it is inexpensive, God-given to all people, that housewives frequently draw their curtains against it. If they had to pay more for it than for carpets and hangings, you may be very sure that a great many husbands and fathers would be overworking in order that their families might buy a whole display of sunshine instead of tapestries.

Do you know what is the most helpful thing you can have in your room, the article without which you cannot live in it at all, no matter how fine the rugs and bric-à-brac may be? _Air!_ Air is the one thing which is almost instantly and absolutely indispensable to human life, for we breathe it in not only through our noses but also all over our skin. Every hundredth fraction of an inch of our bodies is feeding upon air, and the purer that air and the cooler the better and more invigorating food it provides for the skin surface as well as for the lungs. The mind, for it is housed in the body and its tenant, must depend for its vigour or tone upon the fresh air in school or college study. Even a very good head cannot work well set upon an anæmic body which is suffocating for want of good clean air. If you wish to do your best work and keep well, the first thing to do is not to open your books but to open your windows. After that the books and a reasonable number of hours of continuous study. American audience halls, pullmans, ordinary coaches and public buildings of all sorts, especially libraries, are notoriously overheated and unventilated. It is the intelligent American girl and woman who, beginning with the home, will correct this evil. The schools are, on the whole, in the forefront of the fresh air movement, especially the public schools. As every one knows, the public schools are establishing open air rooms for their children who need them. Although there is much to be said about what a room should contain to make it attractive, it should never be forgotten that sunshine and fresh air are more beautiful and more priceless than anything else which it can hold.

The first object in furnishing a bare room is to make it habitable,--that is useful. Take the kitchen, for example, and usefulness is practically the sole object in fitting it up. And the curious thing about it all is that it cannot help being beautiful in a homely, motherly way, for it exemplifies one of the strongest elements of all beauty and that is _service_. The kitchen may be a very humble place but if more women would make a study of their kitchens and then take thought, it is likely that the rest of their houses would be in much better taste. A thing that is useful, even as with some well-worn homely old woman who has led a good and helpful life, always acquires a beauty of its own. It may be hard for girls to see this but it is there, and in time it will be seen. Just as it is essentially more beautiful to have a clean, strong body rather than a pretty face and a body that is not what it ought to be, so is it more truly beautiful to have articles of furnishing in our rooms, in study or kitchen, that are of indispensable genuine use.

Take the gaudy ambitious study one girl has made for herself. It is defaced by the presence of articles of no value at all in the world of needs; there is nothing in it that is genuinely beautiful and nothing that is substantially useful. The furniture is almost too cheap to stand on its own legs, and the colours would certainly never wash and not even wear. This room is a junk-shop of new, useless, unattractive objects of no virtue,--in short, a most unpleasant place in which to live. Have you ever considered what gives even the simplest clothes for distinctive occasions a beauty of their own? It is fitness. And it is this same fitness which tells so much in furnishing a room. It might be said of certain dresses that they "go together," that is, they are harmonious, they belong together, they have, like some people, the beauty of agreeing with themselves, and a very desirable sort of beauty it is. Just as clothes are an expression of the people who wear them, so are rooms an expression of the people who live in them. No well-bred girl cares for tawdry, cheap, over-ornamented clothes. She is made uncomfortable even at the very thought of having to wear such things. She should suffer just as much discomfort on the score of a cheaply furnished (and by "cheap" here I do not mean inexpensive--whitewash and deal intelligently used may create a beautiful room), overcrowded and over-ornamented study.

What is the meaning of the room which is your school centre for the time being? It is an intimate place where a girl may have her friends and good times; it is a retreat and it is a workshop. It is the girl's home centre away from home, the place from which she will lead her life, in its expression attractive or unattractive, like her or unlike her. To intend that this room in beauty, in cleanliness, in order, shall be the best expression possible of the girl's best self is the ideal to set for the school study.

Get good materials and good colours. They need not be expensive. Remember that colours have to go together just as furniture has to do so. To have styles of furniture that clash or colours that do not harmonize will negative any care which the student may have taken in the selection of individual pieces or materials. To have too much with which to fill the room is a good deal worse than not to have enough. Much better it is to have a few things which are just what they should be than to have too many and those undesirable. To get a desk, if a girl can afford to do so, that she will be glad to keep her life long is a good beginning, and a comfortable chair that will be made doubly precious by all the school associations woven about it. And let her be careful about pictures for her walls and not crowd them with cheap and "fashionable" trash. Above all, let her remember that good taste, simplicity, careful selection, will do more to assure her the possession of an attractive room than all the money in the world can do.

V

THE TOOLS OF STUDY AND THEIR USE

A girl ought to take up her study with the same sense of pleasure as that with which a strong workman enters his shop, knowing his tools and able to use them. Having good tools and knowing them is certainly part of the joy of work. And what are the tools the student must use? Well, for the average student, the one that is first and most important is _Good Health_. The mind is not as clear if the body is not in good health, clean within and without.

The second set of tools consists of a different sort of equipment and apparatus, tools with which a girl must become familiar and which she must know how to use--_Books_, _Library_, _Laboratory_ and _Classroom_. Why shouldn't a student be just as able to use her books as a carpenter his plane or saw? One couldn't expect a fumbling carpenter or a clumsy seamstress to accomplish much work or good work. There are times when a girl need not claim to know anything but she must, at least, know where to find what she wants to know. This is the first lesson in the use of books; without knowledge of them or love for them, the student can't get along at all. And beyond this somewhat mechanical use of books there is a deeper and larger lesson to learn; to know that a book is not merely a page of print where information may be sought but that it is a mirror in which one finds the world, its wisdom, its joy, its sorrow, its divine adventures. Robert Southey, the friend of the poet Coleridge, has written beautifully on the subject in a little poem called "His Books."

Another tool in the student's workshop is _Previously Acquired Knowledge_: that is, what one has in one's mind. Some people's minds are junk-shops. But a junk-shop is better than an empty shop. This previously acquired knowledge, if used rightly, becomes the tool of later courses, the servant of later years. Our stored-up facts--many of them--have not been an end in themselves. How could they be? For example, such things as paradigms and formulæ and long lists of names and dates, are tools pure and simple; but the student in the workshop must have them or she will be like a carpenter who had much to do but on coming to his bench found no tools there and so was idle all day.

A fourth tool for the girl in her study--one that cannot be deliberately acquired, as information or apparatus or even health can be--is _Experience_. This is the most valuable tool of all--one's experience of travel, with people, in responsibility, in love, in joy, in sorrow, in any kind of work. The girls who are the most interesting in the classroom are the girls who are not contenting themselves with apparatus alone but whose minds are flexible with experience, who bring all of themselves, their life, to bear upon the work. A certain well-known minister had prepared a sermon for his usual Sunday engagement, but half an hour before service another text came into his mind. He could not forget it, so he jotted down notes and preached the new sermon instead of the one that had been prepared. This sermon made a great impression on all who heard it, and the minister himself said of it that some people would declare that it had been thought out in half an hour, but that really he had put fifty years of his life into it. The sharper and better the tools, the finer the character of the work. If experience has been observed and retained, and previously acquired knowledge is ready for service, and hand and mind know how to use books, and the student is in good condition physically, then the excellence of that girl's work in the class and out can be guaranteed.

And now what are the uses of the work which these tools can accomplish for us? Coleridge wrote in his poem, "Work Without Hope,"

"Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live."

The only hope that can last is hope that is not wholly centred in ourselves, but has some thought for others and our service to them. Work devoid of inspiration and ideals, work done merely for one's self, study pursued with only a degree as an end or for the sake of "pay" as a teacher, turns school and college into a market-place, a place of barter, where in exchange for so much energy and so much money we may acquire a certain position and livelihood. Only that work in which one has the consciousness of being, or becoming, useful to others, brings joy that will endure. What do we think of the minister who is without a sense of consecration? The responsibility of the student or the teacher is quite as large, the opportunity for service quite as wonderful. One of our greatest English poets, William Wordsworth, exclaimed: "I wish to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing!" The calling of the teacher, of the student, has through all time been thought a high one,--one that has drawn to itself fine and unselfish spirits. The life of the student, no matter how necessary to the world its market-places are, never has been and never can be a life of barter, of trade.

The wealth that comes to the student should not be an exclusive possession. It may be bought at a large price but it can never be sold. It must be given away, or shared, for it is wealth which carries with it a sense of social responsibility. It is enjoyed for a double purpose, not only for the sake of the happiness it brings to us but also for the sake of the joy or help it may bring to others. Millions of girls covet the opportunities that come to a few in school and college, many of them who far more greatly deserve this privilege than we. Indeed, what have most of us done to merit the right to all that we have? The only way in which we can show our sense of justice is by taking our privileges as something to share with others. The girl who has health, pleasant surroundings and work worth doing, has all a human being has a right to expect. She ought always to be happy, always rejoicing in her work and always eager to divide her wealth with others.

The redeeming feature of royalties has been their sense of responsibility for their subjects! In great disasters, or calamities, their first thought has been to go to the relief of the people. The King and Queen of Italy are noble examples of this courage and unselfishness. In America the only "privileged" class is the highly educated. It is they from whom _noblesse oblige_ must be expected, who will show in all emergencies their sense of responsibility, who will share all that they have with others. A girl will be happy, she will grow, she will be a leverage power for good with those among whom she lives, only in so far as she uses her tools of knowledge in the service of others, and shapes all that she does towards some humanly useful end.

VI

THE JOY OF WORK

If one is in good condition, the exercise of any physical power is a pleasure. It is a pleasure to run, to sing, to dance, to climb mountains, to row, to swim; it is a pleasure to shout for nothing else than for the pure joy of letting off surplus energy. In the world of animals, the horse and dog, to take only two illustrations, abound in this enjoyment of physical energy. The horse paws the ground and snorts and whinnies and loves the fastest road pace you will let him take. The dog leaps in the air, jumps fences, barks, and races around madly, sometimes after nothing at all.

But the highest power of which human beings are possessed is not the power of the body. It is the power of the mind. Yet many of us throughout our school and college life not only do not wish to use this power but even rebel against it. "What," some girls are saying to themselves, "enjoy the work of a classroom? Who ever heard of such a thing!" Yes, just that. And if we don't enjoy the work of a classroom, even an indifferently good one, there is something the matter with us, or the subject should not have a place on any curriculum. Every mental exercise should be full of the keenest pleasure, of intellectual pleasure.