A Woman of the World Part 16

As she grows in understanding and years, keep yourself at her side, her nearest friend. Let her feel that she can express her every thought to you, and that every question which presents itself to her developing mind, you will seek to answer to the best of your ability.

Be her confidant, her adviser, her friend, and let her find pride and happiness in doing things for you.

Never act as maid or domestic to your daughter.

Be the queen and make her your first lady-in-waiting, and show her the courtesy and appreciation her position demands from royalty. She will be a better daughter, and a better wife and mother, later in life, if you do not make the mistake of the average American mother of waiting upon her from the cradle to the altar. Let her grow up with the quiet understanding that you are to be first considered, in matters social and financial. Your wardrobe must be as well looked after as her own, and if there is to be economy for one, let her practise it.

The daughter who has a whole household sacrificing and toiling for her pleasures is spoiled for a wife and woman. The most admirable young women I have known--and I have known many--are those who were taught to take it as a matter of course that the mother was first to be considered, and lovingly served.

Do not be afraid of making your daughter vain by telling her the attractive features she may possess.

Some one else will if you do not, and it is well for her to hear it from lips which may more successfully offer counsel afterward. A certain confidence in her own charms gives a sensibly reared young woman a poise and self-possession which is to be desired. A touch of feminine vanity renders a woman more anxious to please, and more alert to keep always at her best.

But beware of having her acquire egotism. Silly conceit is the death-blow to higher attainments and to all charm.

Teach your daughter early the accomplishment of listening well. She will be certain to please if she understands its value.

A woman who looks the converser in the eyes, and does not allow her glance to wander and become distrait, and who does not interrupt before the recital is finished, can be sure of popularity with both men and women.

Give both your son and daughter confidence in themselves and belief in their power to achieve. There is tremendous power in the early inoculation by the home influence of self-confidence, when it is tempered by modesty and consideration for others.

Remember whatever in your own bringing up seems to-day unfortunate, and avoid it in the training of your children.

Remember whatever was good and helpful, and emulate it.

To Miss Zoe Clayborn Artist

_Concerning the Attentions of Married Men_

I am sure, my dear niece, that you are a good and pure-minded girl, and that you mean to live a life above reproach, and I fully understand your rebellion against many of the conventional forms which are incompatible with the career of a "girl bachelor," as you like to call yourself. But let us look at the subject from all sides, while you are on the threshold of life, in the morning of your career, and before you have made any more serious mistakes than the one you mention.

For it was a mistake when you accepted Mr. Gordon's telephone message to lunch alone with him at a restaurant, even though you knew his wife might not object.

Mr. and Mrs. Gordon are happily married, parents of several children.

They are broader and more liberal and more unselfish than most parents, and they went out of their path to extend courtesies to you, a young country girl--at first because you were my niece, then because they liked you personally.

When I first wrote Mrs. Gordon that you were to open a studio in Chicago after your course of study in the East, she expressed deep interest in you, and seemed anxious to have you consider her as a friend--always ready to act as a chaperon or adviser when you felt the need of wiser guidance than your own impulses.

Mrs. Gordon knew that your experience of the world was limited to a country village in the West, and two years' study at the Pratt Inst.i.tute. While there she knew you boarded with a cousin of your mother's, and enjoyed the a.s.sociation and privileges of the daughters of the home.

To start alone in Chicago, and live in your studio, and dine from a chafing-dish, and sleep in an unfolded combination bureau and refrigerator--has more fascinations to your mind than to Mrs. Gordon's.

She was reared in comfort, bordering on luxury, and while her early home life was not happy, she enjoyed all the refinements and all the privileges of protected girlhood.

She knows city life as you cannot know it, and, although she discards many of the burden-some conventions of society, she realizes the necessity of observing some of its laws.

She wanted you to feel that you had the background of a wholesome home, and the protection of clean, well-behaved married friends in your exposed situation; her att.i.tude to you is just what she would want another woman to hold toward her daughter, were she grown up and alone in a large city.

You have been her guest, and she has been your good friend. Mr. Gordon admired you from the first, and that was a new incentive for this most tactful and liberal of wives to befriend you. She always cultivates the women he likes.

This is excellent policy on the part of a wife. If the husband has any really n.o.ble qualities or possesses a sterling character, he will appreciate and respect his wife's confidence, and never violate it; and added to this, he will usually become disillusioned with the women he has admired from a distance, when he sees them frequently at too close range.

A wife can make no greater mistake than trying to fence her husband about and obtruding high walls between him and the women he admires. Far better bring them near and turn on the calcium light.

Mr. Gordon is a born lover of the fair s.e.x, a born gallant. He is, at the same time, a clean, self-respecting man. But he has grown a trifle selfish and a bit vain of late years.

He does not fully realize what the interesting family of children he shows with such pride to his friends has meant to their mother.

It has not occurred to him that to be the mother of three children, the youngest one year old, after six years of married life, has required a greater outlay of all the mental, moral, and physical forces than has been demanded of their father.

He is a good husband,--yet he is not the absolutely unselfish and liberal and thoughtful husband that Mrs. Gordon is wife.

If she seemed to you at all nervous, or less adaptable to your moods than he, you should stop and consider the many causes which might have led to this condition.

You are young, handsome, gifted, and unconventional, and all these things appeal to men. You can attract all the admirers you want, and more than you need, to enlarge your ideas of life, and extend your knowledge of human nature.

You say your ambition is to know the world thoroughly,--that it will aid your art.

I think that is true, if you do not pa.s.s the border-line and lose your ideals and sacrifice your principles. Once you do that, your art will lose what it can never regain.

And remember this, my dear girl, no human being ever lived or ever will live who gained anything worth having _by sacrificing the golden rule._ In your search for knowledge of the world, and acquaintance with human nature, _keep that motto ever before your soul's sight,_ "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

You say Mr. Gordon said or did nothing in that tete-a-tete luncheon his wife might not have heard or seen, but the fact that he talked entirely about you and art, and other universal subjects, and seemingly avoided any reference to his wife and children, surprised you.

And now you are wondering if you did wrong to accept this invitation.

Never accept invitations of any kind from married men, unless the wife or some member of the family is included.

No matter how willing the wife may be to have you enjoy her husband's company, avoid tete-a-tete situations with benedicts.

You say you are not egotistical enough to imagine Mr. Gordon had any hidden motive for wanting to be alone with you, or for seemingly forgetting in his conversation that he was a husband and father. Yet I can see that in a measure it disillusioned you.

You do not ask a man to fling his wife and children at the head of each woman he meets, but you like him to recognize their existence.

You are a young, romantic girl seeking the ideal.

You want to find happy wives and husbands,--men and women who have sailed away from the Strands of Imagination to the more beautiful land of the Real, from whose sh.o.r.es they beckon you, saying: "Here is happiness and great joy. Come and join us, and feel no fear in flinging the illusions of youth behind you."

If married men only knew that is what young women are seeking,--if married women only knew that is what young men are seeking, what reconstruction would take place in the deportment of husbands and wives!

Never yet did a married woman indulge in flirtatious or sentimental converse with a bachelor without lowering herself and all women in his heart of hearts.

Never yet did a married man seem to forget his domestic ties in the presence of single women without losing a portion of their respect, however they may have been flattered by his attentions.

In every man's heart, in every woman's, is this longing to find husbands and wives who are satisfied and happy and proud, above all other things, of their loyalty.