She
does not know, indeed, just what it is that makes Sallie Henderson
so delightful; but "Oh, she is per-fect-ly lovely!--too sweet for any
thing!" Now I think the quality which so attracts is womanliness, the
most desirable of all the gifts a girl is permitted to cultivate. All
the littlenesses in the social customs of girls; all their raw,
untrained, ungenerous acts, their indulgences, their prejudices, are
the weak and despised signs of unwomanliness.
Womanliness is not primness, let me be understood. The straight, smooth
hair, the folded hands, the demure face and exact deportment from ten
years of age to eighty, do not always indicate womanliness; nor does
the attempt to turn young girls into elderly women produce it. So many
patchwork quilts, so many hand-stitched shirt-bosoms, so many worsted
stockings, made before a girl is fourteen, are so many quilts, bosoms,
and stockings more than she will make when she is forty. Hours for
sewing, for helping in the home, for studying, are necessary to even
children, because industry, patience, application, and system must
be encouraged in earliest years; but the hours girls spend in the house
doing things neatly and in order, as their grandmothers did before
them, ought to be balanced by hearty exercise in the fresh air, by
seasons of mirth, and by freedom from restraint. The out-of-door
exercise, the gayety, the deliverance from tasks, are quite as necessary
for older girls as for younger ones.
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