Let
us all avoid fickleness, however,--the doing a little of this and of
that: it is poor economy. To grow up to a work, to master it, we must
first be slaves to it. Girls, everywhere, make progress
slowly,--_grow_ in efficiency, and do not shoot up into it.
Now, I want to talk a little to the girls who have leisure,--so much
of it, sometimes, that it all turns crazy on their hands, and expends
itself in the last most fashionable excitement. Girls too often do
things just because other girls are doing them, never for a moment
considering fitness or ability; consequently they look back upon half-
accomplished bits of work--this or that insanity in worsted, card-board,
wood-carving, modelling, or darning--very much as they would upon
the broken fragments of an upset dinner-table. Away up in that
convenient attic lie the desecrated splendors of the past, scattered
in confusion by charitable mice,--blue and crimson wax-flowers melt
underneath the eaves, all destitute of petals that would not fit on;
patchwork quilts and cushions, in silk and satin distractions, just
fall short of harmony in the arrangement of their squares and colors;
vivid buttercups and daisies mingle with bulky cat-o'-nine-tails,--all
on canvas covered with paint; blacking-jugs adorned with pictures,
embossed and otherwise; moth-eaten Kensington, partly outlined in
conventional lilies and conventional stitches; forlorn-looking cats
and dogs on half-made rugs and slippers,--all, all are there to point
out certain very unpleasant morals, referring chiefly to inability
and lack of perseverance.
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