Almost a Woman Part 6

"Mother, it makes me think of a little girl I saw at the seaside last summer. She was dancing on the edge of the waves. They came up and washed over her little pink toes and she laughed with delight. After a time the tide rose a little higher and the waves dashed over her feet and still she thought it fun; and then came one big wave and threw her down and carried her out to sea, and if there hadn't been some sailors right there with a boat she would have been drowned,--and all the time she thought it fun till the last wave came, and then she was frightened awfully."

"Your ill.u.s.tration is a very good one, my daughter, and I fear that poor Belle is dancing in the gentle foam of a wave that will grow in power till it carries her out to sea, a lost girl."

"Mother, I really don't see how a girl can let a man become so familiar with her. I should think it would disgust her at once; and yet Edith seemed like a perfect lady."

"No doubt you will understand this puzzling matter better after a few years than you do now, but I can explain it to you partly. It is a part of human nature that men and women are very attractive to each other, and in a way that does not exist between men and men or women and women.

It may be called a sort of personal magnetism. As they begin to develop into men and women, they begin to feel this new attraction. They want to please each other. New feelings and emotions are felt. If their hands touch, they feel a sort of electric thrill, even the glance of the eye may cause the same thrill. They enjoy it, and they do not know what it means. They do not know that, while it is pleasant, it is also dangerous.

"Girls are more ignorant than young men, because, as a rule, they have been taught less. The young men know more, but in all probability they have not learned from sources that are pure. The young girl does not understand that her coquettish glances and tossings of the head and simperings are so many intuitive efforts to awaken that sort of magnetic thrill in the young man. If she knew it, she would see that it is more maidenly to hold in check all actions that would tend to make the young man desire to be familiar with her."

"But, mother, if it is not right to be familiar, why does G.o.d make us with those desires?"

"G.o.d has given us many desires that are right under certain conditions and wrong under others and He has given us reason with which to control our desires. It is right to eat when the food is our own, but wrong to eat if we have stolen the food. It is right to enjoy the attraction of one to whom our heart and life is given, but otherwise we are defrauding some one else. You can understand that you would not want the man you are to marry to have had familiarities with many other girls, neither would he like to think that other men had been permitted to be free with you.

"If you were going to select a dress that was to last all your life long, you would not choose goods that had been handled and were shop-worn. Even so with husband and wife. Each likes to feel sure that the freshest, purest love of the heart and modesty of person has been kept unstained from the slightest unwarrantable familiarity."

CHAPTER IV.

"O Mother, I am so glad you are at home again. I had a lovely talk with father last evening, but it wasn't you. He gave me lots to think about, though. He said that mothers need to have such a broad education; that they should even be chemists, mother, think of that!"

"Does that seem such a strange idea to you? Really they need to be much more than that. They should be good teachers, to instruct their children, wise judges, in order to know what justice is, doctors of medicine so as to understand the first symptoms of illness and how to treat it, and surgeons so as to know how to bind up wounds, treat cuts and bruises and even how to reduce a dislocated finger if necessary.

They should be physiologists so as to understand the laws of bodily health, and psychologists so as to know and obey the laws of the mental development of their children."

"O, mother! How can one girl learn all those hard things?"

Mrs. Wayne smiled indulgently as she replied, "O, she won't have to learn all of them at once. Taken one at a time, through all the years preceding her marriage, she will find she can learn something of each without taxing herself too severely. For example, you can learn now how to take care of your own health, and that will help you to care for the health of your children when they come. You have already studied First Aid to the injured in your physiology cla.s.s. When you go to College you will study psychology as a part of your course of study."

"What does that big word mean, mother?"

"Psychology means the science of mind. I said that mothers need to be psychologists; that is, students of the science of mind, so that they will understand the indications of the development of mind in their babies. A child gets the largest part of its education before it is six years old."

"O, mamma, do you really mean that?"

"I certainly do. In the first place, it has to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, its body. You do not realize now that you had to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, every one of the muscular movements that you can now make without thinking of them. You remember what hard work it was to learn the piano and that was only learning to use a very few muscles in a certain way. As a baby you had to practice hours a day before you could learn to hold anything in your fingers. Your little hands flew about very wildly at first, but by constant practice you gained skill at last."

"Why, mamma, I never thought that a baby was practicing when it was throwing its hands about."

"But it is practicing, and it keeps it up hour after hour, day after day, until it has learned to hold things, to pull itself up, to sit up, to hold its head up, to creep, to walk, to climb.

"Have you any idea what a wonderful feat has been accomplished when a baby has learned to walk? Physiologists tell us that walking is continually beginning to fall and perpetual recovery from falling. It is a greater thing for the baby than those acrobatic feats which so amazed you the other day.

"Then the mental education begins also at birth. The baby is building his brain by everything he sees and does, and it is the mother's duty to see that this brain-building goes on in accordance with the law of his nature. Every baby is a new being with a nature of his own, and what was good for his brother may not be good for him. The training that will give one child self-confidence will make a little tyrant of another; what would render one merely amenable to control might make a coward of another. So you see, my dear, that a mother needs to have great knowledge of the laws of mind and great insight in the applying of those laws to the particular cases she has in hand."

"It really seems, mamma, as if girls ought to study all those things before they marry."

"Indeed they ought, but I fear they never will until they come to have a clearer idea of the value and importance of the mother's work. When they realize that the great and lasting work of the world is done in the homes, by the mothers, with their little children, then we shall have men demanding that girls shall be prepared for that important work by previous education.

"There is another way, too, in which women are given great power over the destiny of the world, and that is through heredity."

"What does that word mean, mother? I have heard it very often, but people speak as if it were something undesirable."

"Heredity means the pa.s.sing on of traits or talents from parents to children. Now, your eyes are like papa's. They are a part of your heredity from him. You have other features like him, and you have many of his traits. It has been easy to teach you to be orderly because you have inherited his love of order. Then, too, you have many of my characteristics. My hair, my love of music, my quick temper."

Helen looked at her mother somewhat in surprise.

"Do you mean, mamma, that I have a quick temper because you had one?"

"I certainly do; and if I had known, when I was of your age, what I know now, I might have given you a different disposition."

"Will my children have a temper because I have one?"

"There will be a greater probability of their having quick tempers because you have one."

"How can I help it, if I got my temper from you and just pa.s.sed it on to them? Certainly I am not to blame."

"Many people excuse themselves for their faults in just that way; but that is to give evil greater power than good, and we don't believe in that, you know. Each one has the power to make himself over, and in the process he may change the direction of the inheritance of his children."

"You mean that if I overcome my temper, my children will not be so likely to have tempers?"

"Yes, by controlling yourself you will have given them greater power of self-control; that is worth working for, isn't it? If, when I was of your age, I had begun to govern my temper, I should have been helping you. So it is in every field of effort. If you are a good student and cultivate your mental powers to the best of your ability, you will make it easier for your children to be good students. Now, in your young girlhood, you are working to help future generations."

"But maybe I'll never have any children, mamma; what then?"

"None of us can see our future, but if we are wise we will prepare for the probabilities. At your age I could not be sure that I would ever be a mother, and now I have several children to call forth every power that I possess through inheritance or by education. You are not sorry that in many ways I was wise enough so to cultivate myself that you have inherited desirable qualities; and you have cause to regret that I did not know now to do better for you. You can learn through my failures, and be kinder to your children than I have been to you. I can a.s.sure you of one thing,--even if you never have children, you will never regret having cultivated yourself in every talent and virtue, but you may have great cause for sorrow if you fail to develop the best in yourself. There is no grief in the world like that caused by wilful or wicked sons and daughters. Their waywardness brings not only sorrow but self-condemnation on the parents who must feel that in some way they have been to blame, either in the inheritance they pa.s.sed on or the training they gave. And there is no happiness equal to the just pride felt in honorable children. As Solomon says: 'Children's children are the crown of old men, and the glory of children are their fathers.'"

Helen was silent a moment and then asked, "Don't you think the law of heredity a very cruel law? It doesn't seem fair that children should be punished for the sins of their parents."

"G.o.d's laws are never cruel, dear. They are always made for our good, and they will be for our good, if we use them rightly. Harry Severn fell yesterday from a scaffold and broke his leg because of the law of gravitation. You might say that was a cruel law, and that G.o.d was unkind to make such a law whereby we can be so seriously injured. But think for one moment what that law means in the universe. If it were not for this mysterious force which we call gravitation, the whole creation would be in chaos. Nothing would stay in place, buildings could not be made, people would fly off the earth and go, no one knows whither. Why, all the suns, moons, and stars of the universe are held in place by gravitation. If we are ever hurt through the action of that law it is because we were not happily related to it, that is all. The law is good, and what we have to do is to learn to work with it.

"It is just so with this law of heredity. It is the law of transmission.

It works right along and transmits good or evil. It is our part to relate ourselves to it so that it will transmit mostly good. When we come to think of it, we see that that is what it princ.i.p.ally does. Health, and honesty, and virtue, all good traits, are so constantly transmitted that we do not think of their coming through heredity, just as we do not think of all order and stability coming through gravity; but when undesirable traits are inherited we complain of the law, just as we complain when we are hurt through the law of gravitation. But do you not see that it is the very fact that the law is sure, that it invariably transmits evil, is one guarantee of its surety in transmitting good?

Indeed, the Bible tells us that good is transmitted in greater degree than evil. The third commandment gives us the law of heredity: 'For I, the Lord thy G.o.d, am a jealous G.o.d, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.' That does not mean thousands of individuals, but, as the revised version gives it, 'thousands of generations.' So you see what encouragement this law gives us. The evil in us is to be transient, the good everlasting. Instead of being weighed down by our undesirable inheritances, we should be encouraged to overcome them and to cultivate our good ones."

"Mamma, don't you think the fathers have something to do as well as the mothers, in trying to give a better inheritance to the children?"

"I surely do, and that is where I think a girl needs to be especially wise in the choice of a husband. If a man has traits or habits that she would not want her children to have, she should remember that, through the law of heredity, that trait is one they will be very likely to inherit.

"Girls quite often think it does not matter if a young man smokes, or even if he drinks a little, but when we study heredity we see what a threat such habits are to the health and welfare of his children. I remember when John Orland was a handsome young man, he drank, sometimes to excess. Kittie Claiborne knew this, and her friends opposed her marrying him, but she thought she could reform him, and you know the result. Her husband is a confirmed drunkard, as is her youngest son. The oldest drinks, too, though not to such excess, and you know that Kitty Orland, such a beautiful girl, has more than once been found under the influence of liquor. The second girl died of consumption, and the second son is weak-minded."

"But, mamma, do you mean that this is all because Mr. Orland drinks?"

"The observation of scientific men as to the effects of alcohol through inheritance would lead us to think so. I find this little item in the paper. You may read it."

Helen read--