Part 7

This is especially true of daughters, and is true of sons up to a certain age.

You can understand, I am sure, how much more companionship a mother would find in children who accepted her faith and attended her church than in those whose spiritual paths led in another direction.

I know Rosalie realizes that a good life, not a certain creed, leads to the goal she seeks, after this phase of existence closes, and she does not ask you to change your faith. But while she would also believe her children were on the road to that goal, she would want them to walk through her path and by her side.

It will be hard to relinquish the woman you love, to-day, for the children who might not come to-morrow.

Yet I can give you the counsel you asked on this matter only from my personal observation of similar unions.

I should advise you to try an absence of some duration, and to forget Rosalie if you can, since you have not yet declared yourself.

Better a little temporary sorrow than a life of discord.

As you grow older your religion will, in all probability, gain a stronger ascendency over your nature, and the church to which you belong is very tenacious in its hold upon its members.

Rosalie is not of a yielding nature, and as I said before, she is more devoted to her church than most young women of the day.

The physical phases of your love blind you now. But these phases are only a part of the tie which must bind husband and wife to make love enduring through all of life's vicissitudes.

There must be mental companionship, and to be a complete union there must be sympathy in spiritual ideas.

The very young do not realize this fact, but it is forced upon the mature.

Marital love is like a tree. It first roots in the soil of earth, and then lifts its branches to the heavens. Unless it does so lift its branches it is stunted and deformed, and is not a tree. Unless it roots in earth it is not a tree, but an air-plant or a cobweb.

You want to be sure the tree you are thinking to make a shelter for your whole life, will have far-reaching and uplifting branches, and will not be merely an earth-bound twig.

Since your church permits no second marriage save by the door of death, do not make a mistake in your first.

Take a year, at least, of absence and separation, and think the matter over.

To Sybyl Marchmont

_Concerning Her Determination to Remain Single_

It is with genuine regret that I learn of your determination to send my nephew out of your life. Wilfred is a royal fellow, as that term is employed by us. He is what a man of royal descent in monarchies rarely proves to be,--self-reliant, enterprising, industrious, clean, and with high ideals of woman.

Eight years ago I declined a request of his for a loan, and told him my reasons--that I believed loans were an injury to our friends or relatives. My letter seemed to arouse all the strength latent in his nature, and he has made a remarkable record for himself since that time. I have known that he was deeply in love with you for the last two years, and I had hoped you would listen to his plea. He tells me that you imparted your history to him, and that you say it is your intention to remain single, as you would not like to bring children into the world to suffer from the stigma upon your name. He has shown me your letter wherein you say, "I am not in fault for having to blush for the sins of my parents; but I would be in fault if my children had to blush for the blemish upon the name of their grandparents. I do not feel I could meet their questioning eyes when they asked me about my parents. I can better bear the loss of the personal happiness of a home and a husband's love."

Wilfred is just the man to protect you and to keep the world at a distance, where it could not affect your life by its comments. He regards your birth in the same light that I do, and would rather transmit your lovely qualities of soul and mind to his descendants than the traits of many proudly born girls who are ready to take him at the first asking: for you must know how popular he is with our sex.

I can not believe you are insensible to his magnetic and lovable qualities, but, as you say, you have been so saddened by the sudden knowledge of your history that it has blunted your emotions in other directions. I can only hope this will wear away and that you will reconsider your resolve and consent to make Wilfred the happy and proud man you could, by becoming his wife.

_Never forget that God created love and man created marriage_.

And to be born of a loveless union is a darker blight than to be born in love without union.

But what I want to talk about now, is your determination to live a single life and to devote yourself to reclaiming weak and erring women. You are young to enter this field of work, yet at twenty-four you are older than many women of thirty-five, because you have had the prematurely ripening rain of sorrow on your life. I know you will go into the work you mention with the sympathy and understanding which alone can make any reformatory work successful. Yet you are going to encounter experiences which will shock and pain you, in ways you do not imagine now.

You are starting out with the idea of most sympathetic good women, that all erring souls of their own sex fall through betrayed trust, and broken promises, and misplaced love. Such cases you will encounter, and they will most readily respond to your efforts for their reformation. But many of those you seek to aid will have gone on the road to folly through mercenary motives, and this will prove a vast obstacle.

When a woman sells to Mammon, under any stress of circumstance, that which belongs to Cupid, there is something left out of her nature and character which renders the efforts of the reformers almost useless. You know all real, lasting reform must come from within. The woman who has once decided that fine apparel, and comfort, and leisure, are of more value to her than her virtue usually reaches old age or disease before the reformer can even gain her attention. You will find many such among your protégées, and you may as well leave them to work out their own reformation, and turn your energies to those who long for a better life.

It is that longing which means real reformation. To paraphrase an old couplet--

The soul reformed against its will Clings to the same old vices still.

I do not believe in a forced morality, save as a protection to a community. I believe in it as a legal fence, but it possesses no value as a religious motive. It helps to save society some annoyance, but it does not materially improve the condition of humanity. Such improvements must come from the desire of men and women to reach higher standards. So, after you have planted a little seed in the mind of the mercenary Magdalene which may in time sprout and grow, pass on, and find those who have gone wrong from other causes, and who are longing for a hand to lead them right.

And of all things do not expect a girl who has lived in the glare of red lights, and listened to the blare of bands, and worn the ofttimes becoming garb of folly, and stimulated her spirits with intoxicants--do not expect her, I say, to suddenly be contented with quiet and solitude, and drudgery, and cheap, unlovely garments, and goodness. Give her something to entertain her and to occupy her mind, give her something to live for and hope for and to be pleased over, besides the mere fact of reformation. The opium victim, you must remember, can not at once partake of wholesome food and be well and happy in the thought that he has given up his drug. Neither can the folly victim. The standards of happiness and contentment which the moral woman has always found satisfactory, she too often considers sufficient for the sister who has wandered from the path. But they are standards which, once lost, must be gained step by step, painfully and slowly. They are not reached by a bound. As much as possible keep your reformed sister's mind from dwelling on the past, or from talking of her mistakes and sins. Blot them from her memory by new and interesting plans and occupations. The way to live a new life is to live it.

And our thoughts and conversation are important parts of living. Instead of praying aloud to God to forgive her sins, show the God spirit in yourself by forgiving and forgetting and helping her to forget.

And now a word about yourself.

You are twenty-four, lovely, sympathetic, fond of children and animals, wholesome and normal in your habits, without crankiness, and popular with both sexes. While there are many wives and widows possessed of these qualities, there seems to be some handicap to the spinster in the race of life who undertakes to arrive at middle age with all the womanly attributes. Almost invariably she drops some of them by the wayside. She becomes overorderly and fussy--so that association with her for any length of time is insupportable--or careless and indifferent. Or she may grow inordinately devoted to animal pets, and bitter and critical toward children and married people.

She may develop mannish traits, and dress and appear more like a man than a feminine woman.

She may ride a hobby, to the discomfort of all other equestrians or pedestrians on the earth's highway. She may grow so argumentative and positive that she is intolerant and intolerable. And whichever of these peculiarities are hers, she is quite sure to be wholly unconscious of it, while she is quick to see that of another. Now watch yourself, my dear Sybyl, as you walk alone toward middle life; do not allow yourself to grow queer or impossible. It was God's intent that every plant should blossom and bear fruit, and that every human being should mate and produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not, once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind, and can control such tendencies if she will.

It is unnatural for a woman to live without the daily companionship of man. The superior single woman must make tenfold the effort of the inferior wife, to maintain her balance into maturity, because of her enforced solitude. As the wife-mother grows older she is kept in touch with youth, and with the world, while the opportunities for close companionship with the young lessen as a single woman passes forty, unless she makes herself especially adaptable, agreeable, and sympathetic.

And this is what I want you to do. At twenty-four it is none too soon to begin planning for a charming maturity.

If you are determined upon a life of celibacy, determine also to be the most wholesome, and normal, and all around liberal, womanly spinster the world has ever seen.

Peace and happiness to you in your chosen lot.

To Mrs. Charles Gordon

_Concerning Her Sister and Her Children_

No, my dear Edna, I do not think it strange that you should seek advice on this subject from a woman who has no living children.

It seems to me no one is fitted to give such unbiased counsel regarding the training of children as the woman of observation, sympathy, and feeling, who has none of her own.

Had I offspring, I would be influenced by my own successes, and prejudiced by my own failures, and unable to put myself in your place, as I now do.

A mother rarely observes other people's children, save to compare them unfavourably with her own. I regret to say that motherhood with the average woman seems to be a narrowing experience, and renders her less capable of taking a large, unselfish view of humanity.

The soldier in the thick of battle is able to tell only of what he personally experienced and saw, just in the spot where he was engaged in action.

The general who sits outside the fray and watches the contest can form a much clearer idea of where the mistakes occurred, and where the greatest skill was displayed.

I am that general, my dear friend, standing outside the field of motherhood, and viewing the efforts of my battling sisters to rear desirable men and women. And I am glad you have appealed to me while your two children are yet babies to give you counsel, for I can tell you where thousands have failed.

And I thank you and your husband for reposing so much confidence in my ideas.

I think, perhaps, we had better speak of the postscript of your letter first. You ask my opinion regarding the chaperon for your sixteen-year-old sister, who is going abroad to study for a period of years. Mrs. Walton will take her and keep her in her home in Paris, and Miss Brown also stands ready to make her one of three young girls she desires to chaperon and guide through a foreign course of study in France and Germany.

You like the idea of having your sister in a home without the association of other American girls, until she perfects herself in French, but you are worried about Mrs. Walton's being a divorced woman. Miss Brown, the spotless spinster, seems the safer guide to your friends, you tell me.

I know the majority of women would feel that a single woman of good standing and ungossiped reputation was a safe and desirable protector for a young girl.

The same majority would hesitate to send their girls away with a divorced woman.

But as I remarked in the beginning, I have stood outside the fray and watched similar ventures, and I have grown to realize that it is not mere respectability and chastity in a woman which make her a safe chaperon for a young girl,--it is a deep, full, broad understanding of temperaments and temptations.

Had I a daughter or a sister like your sweet Millie, I would not allow her to live one year under the dominion of such a woman as Miss Brown for any consideration. Why? because Miss Brown is all brain and bigotry. She is narrow and high, not deep and broad.

She is so orthodox that she incites heresy in the rebellious mind of independent youth. She is so moral she makes one long for adventure. She would not listen to any questioning of old traditions, or any speculative philosophizing of a curious young mind, and she would be intolerant with any girl who showed an inclination to flirt or be indiscreet.

Your sister Millie is as coquettish as the rose that lifts its fair face to the sun, and the breeze, and the bee, and expects to be admired. She is as innocent as the rose, too, but that fact Miss Brown would never associate with coquetry.

She would class it with vulgarity and degeneracy. Miss Brown is a handsome woman, but she has no sex instincts. She does not believe with the scientist, "that in the process of evolution it is only with the coming of the sex relation that life is enabled to rise to higher forms."

She believes in brain and spirit, and is utterly devoid of that feminine impulse to make herself attractive to men, and wholly incapable of understanding the fascination that Folly holds out to youth. She has never experienced any temptation, and she would be shocked at any girl who fell below her standard.

She would carefully protect Millie from danger by high walls, but she would never eradicate the danger impulse from her nature by sympathetic counsel, as a more human woman could.

Mrs. Walton is a much better guide for your sister.

She ran away from boarding-school at seventeen, and married the reckless son of a rich man. She had a stepmother of the traditional type, and had never known a happy home life. She was of a loving and trusting and at the same time a coquettish nature, and she attracted young Walton's eye while out for a walk with a "Miss Brown" order of duenna. The duenna saw the little embryo flirtation, and became very much horrified, and preached the girl a long sermon, and set a close watch upon her actions.

There was no wise, loving guidance of a young girl's life barque from the reefs of adventure. It was homily and force. The result was, that the girl escaped from school before six weeks passed, and married her admirer.

He was fifteen years her senior, a reckless man of the world, even older in experience than in years. He proved a very bad husband, but his young wife remained with him until his own father urged her to leave him. She was quietly divorced, and has lived abroad almost ever since, and holds an excellent position in the French capital, as well as in other European centres, and she is most exemplary in her life. Mr. Walton is now an inmate of a sanitarium, a victim of paresis.

I can imagine no one so well fitted to exert the wisest influence upon Millie's life as Mrs. Walton.

There is a woman who has run the whole gamut of girlish folly, and who knows all the phases of temptation. She knows what it is to possess physical attractions, and to be flattered by the admiration of men, and she has passed through the dark waters of disillusion and sorrow. She would be the one to help Millie out of dangerous places by sympathy and understanding, instead of using sermons and keys.

She would mould her young, wax-like character by the warmth of love, instead of freezing it by austere axioms.

Miss Brown would make an indiscreet young girl feel hopelessly vulgar and immodest; Mrs. Walton that she understood all about her foolish pranks, and was able to lead her in the better paths.

Miss Brown prides herself upon never having lost her head with any man.

Mrs. Walton is like some other women I have known, who have made mistakes of judgment. She lost her head, but in the losing and the sorrow that ensued she found a heart for all humanity.

There are women in this world whose cold-white chastity freezes the poor wayfarer who tries to find in their vicinity rest and comfort and courage.

Other women cast a cooling shadow, in which the sun-scorched pilgrim finds peace--the shadow of a past error, from which spring fragrant ferns and sweet grasses, where tired and bleeding feet may softly tread.

Mrs. Walton's life casts the shadow of divorce on her pathway, but it is only the warm, restful shadow of a ripening and mellowing sorrow. Do not fear to have Millie walk in it.

It will be better for her than the steady glare from a glacier.

I find I have said so much about your sister that I must reserve my counsel about your children for another letter.

Your postscript was brief, but pregnant with suggestion, and called for this long reply.

I shall write you again in a few days.

To Mrs. Charles Gordon

_Concerning Her Children_

Your wish to have your son, who is now four years old, begin to develop the manly qualities, and your oldest daughter, who has reached the mature age of three, start wisely on the path to lovely womanhood, is far from being premature.

"The tree inclines as the twig is bent," we are told.

Most mothers wait until the tree is in blossom before they begin to train its inclination.

Your boy is quite old enough to be taught manly pride, in being useful to you and his sisters.

Such things are not successfully taught by preaching or scolding or punishing; but are more easily inculcated by tact and praise, object-lesson and play.

A four-year-old boy is all ears when his father's praises and achievements are recounted. Any father, save a brute, is a hero in the eyes of his four-year-old son. I am sure Mr. Gordon has many admirable traits you can use as interesting topics.

Tell little Charlie how proud you are to have a son who will be like his father, and attend to the needs of and look after the interests of his mother and sisters.

Make him think that to be of service to you or his sisters is one of the first steps toward manhood, as indeed it is.

When he performs any small kindness, praise his manliness.

Teach him to open doors, and to make way for women and elders, as a part of manly courtesy.

Speak with gentle disapproval of the unfortunately common type of American boy who pushes women and older people aside to scramble into public conveyances and secure a seat before them.

Say how proud you are that your son could not be guilty of such unmanly conduct.

When you are walking with him, call his attention to any woman or child or poor man in trouble, and if his services can be of use, urge him to offer them.

I saw one day a small boy spring to the aid of an old coloured woman who had dropped a lot of parcels in the street, and I thought it was a certain evidence that his mother was a rare and sweet woman. For the manners of little boys are almost invariably what their mothers make them.

Awake early in his heart a sympathy for the deformed, the crippled, and otherwise unfortunate beings.

There is no other country where such vulgar and heartless curiosity, and even ridicule, is bestowed upon grotesque or unsightly types of humanity, as in America.

A little dwarfed girl in New York City committed suicide a few years ago because she was so weary of being laughed at and ridiculed by her associates in the street and at school.

Think of that, in this Christian age, and in the metropolis of America!

An old street peddler was set upon by school-children and so annoyed and misused that he became insane.

Another was injured by street children--the children of the public schools--and died from the effects of their abuse.

This is the fault of mothers who have never deemed it their duty and privilege to awaken the tender and protective qualities in the character of their children.

Speak often to your boy of the pathos of dumb animals dependent upon human thoughtfulness for food, drink, and decent usage.

Say what a privilege it seems to you to be able to befriend them, and to be a voice for them in making others realize their duty to our dumb brothers.

Obtain interesting books on natural history and read stories of animal life to your boy. Instruct him in the habits of beast, bird, and insect, and talk to him of the wonderful domestic instincts and affections in many of our speechless associates. The exhilaration of the wild bird, and the happiness of the deer and the hare in the woods and fields, call to his mind day by day. It will be more gratifying to you when he is man grown to feel he is the loving friend and protector, rather than the skilled hunter of bird and beast.

The higher order of man does not seek slaughter for amusement. He realizes that he has no right to take, save for self-protection, that which he cannot give.

Make your son a higher order of man by developing those brain cells and leaving the destructive and cruel portions of the brain to shrink from lack of use.

Even in his play with his inanimate toys, you can be arousing the best or the worst part of your boy's nature.

The child who whips and screams at his hobby-horse usually, when a man, whips and bellows at his flesh and blood steed.

Tell him the play-horse is more easily managed by coaxing and petting, and that loud voices make it nervous and frightened.

Suggest water and feed at suitable times, and express sorrow for the horses with no kind boys to look out for them.

Start a humane society in the nursery and make your boy president and your little girl honorary member, and act as treasurer and secretary yourself.

Give him a medal when he offers food to a hungry street animal or speaks to a driver cruel to his horse, or performs any other kind act. This will be interesting play to your children, and it will be sowing seed in fallow ground.

Your baby girl is already old enough to take pride in picking up the toys she scatters, and putting her chair where it belongs. Make it a part of your hour of sport with her to help her do these things. She will not know she is being taught order.

I learned this lesson from a famous author whose baby son was anxious to play about the library where his father was at work.