explained in my first letter, it will guide you on all occasions, and,
if you are disillusioned and disgusted with your husband, it will
suggest the finest course for you to take. Try to be just, do not
repine, admit to yourself that you have lost the first prize in the
lottery of marriage, but that there is still the second to be obtained,
namely, an unassailable position, your husband’s respect, perhaps the
interest in possible children, the interest in your life and your place
in the world. And, above all, that inward peace which comes from the
knowledge that you at least on your side are keeping up the dignity of
your name and station.
You may say all this would be but a very second best, when love had
been shipwrecked. I fully admit it, but it is more advisable to obtain
the second best than the tenth--or to go under altogether.
Accept the fact that such happiness as you had hoped for is not for you,
and decide to be a noble woman and do your duty. Reflection will tell
you that whatever you sow you will reap, so, if this misfortune should
come to you, keep your head, Caroline, and use your common sense.
Another thing to remember is that you will not always be young, and that
many years of your life will probably be passed when the respect of the
world, a great position, and the material advantages will count more
than the romantic part of love.
[Illustration: “_A great position will count more than the romantic part
of love._”]
And if, through your disillusion and disgust, and the pain of broken
idols, you permit yourself to act foolishly and with want of dignity at
a period when love seems of supreme importance, you will be laying up
limitations for yourself. And it is only the fool who lays up
limitations for himself or herself. You will not have got love back by
acting so, and you will have lost what might have compensated you in the
future. Nothing is more pitiful than the position of the woman of
forty-five who has made scandals in her youth, quarreled with her
husband and broken up her home, just because she herself was unhappy and
the man was a brute. She is then left with none of the consolations of
middle age. No one considers her; she is spoken of by her friends and
relations as “poor So-and-so.” If she has had children, they have grown
up under the wretched conditions of an atmosphere of partisanship for
either parent. She is ever conscious of an anomalous position, and has
to go through more humiliations than she would have had to do if she had
borne bravely the anguishes of the time of trial, and used the whole of
her intelligence to better the state of things.
However much a man may turn into a brute, if he has once loved the woman
she must in some way be to blame, because love is so strong a master
that it can soften the greatest wretch, and if the woman had kept him
loving her she would have kept her influence over him as well.
So you can see, Caroline, the tremendous responsibility you will be
taking upon yourself when you marry, and how terribly, tragically
foolish it will be of you to enter into this bond lightly and without
due reflection.
Now for the other subject I alluded to: the permitting and encouraging
of vagrant fancies. In these days, when no discipline has been taught
girls, and very little principle, they are prone to indulge any caprice
which comes into their heads. Good-looking and attractive young women
like you, Caroline, are bound to have many temptations to look elsewhere
for diversions very soon after they are married. And here wisdom--quite
apart from high principle--should teach you to resist as much as
possible, because of the end. Ask yourself if it is worth while to
start a ball rolling which can only roll down hill--if it is worth
while, for the momentary gratification of vanity, to open a door which
will let in complete disillusion for the life which you have undertaken
to live. Because all forbidden excitements are like drugs--they have to
be taken in stronger and stronger doses to produce their effect, until
the patient is a wretched maniac or dies under the strain. Suggestion
and a strong will are such great helps to happiness. Suggest to your
subconscious mind that you are perfectly happy and contented with your
legitimate mate--make the current between you one of tenderness and
charm, and sternly control every unbalanced fancy. I quote here another
of my maxims: “It is a wise man who knows when he is happy and can
appreciate the divine bliss of the tangible _now_. Most of us retrospect
or anticipate, and so lose the present.”
Do not retrospect--do not anticipate. Go on from day to day enjoying the
good things which fate has given you: _ménage_ them like a careful
housewife--use forethought--quite a different thing to anticipation!
Recognize that you are happy and decide what makes you so, and how you
can continue to employ the methods to keep this joyous state. Be
perfectly calm, and believe that nothing can alter or interrupt the
enchanting present. For do not forget--each one draws to himself or
herself what his or her thoughts dwell upon. Those who lay up for a
rainy day attract the rainy day as surely as those who always believe
that good will come secure good. A very useful thing for you to do is to
look round at all your young married friends, and see what niches they
have carved for themselves in the world--which ones are considered and
have prestige, which are treated as nobodies, which are laughed at or
pitied. Then try to decide upon the grade in public opinion you would
desire to occupy yourself, and what are the causes of your friends being
in whatever places they are. You will get a number of advantageous hints
if you do this before you embark upon marriage yourself.
You will find that simplicity, good manners, and absence of all pretense
are things which attract everyone. You will be wise never to be drawn
into a set one iota lower than the one you wish to shine in. Weed your
acquaintances and remain faithful to your friends. Society is composed,
so to speak, of three loops. There is the very common loop which, at its
upper edge, slightly overlaps the one above it, so that the best of
these common people will just be seen at the worst of the middle loop’s
parties. The middle loop, in its turn, overlaps at its highest point the
third and great loop, which never mingles with the first and lowest one.
You, Caroline, will enter society by the best door, so see that you are
not drawn to the lower edge of your loop, and so into the vortex
beneath. A large section of the world rave and storm that people are
snobs who desire to be in the best society, but they forget that it is
entirely the most amusing, the most intelligent and the most desirable,
and therefore a very natural goal for newcomers to aim at. The cleverest
men go where they meet the cleverest and most entertaining women. And
these are naturally to be found among the leisured classes, who have had
time to polish all their attractions, who have had money enough to see
the world and cultivate their critical faculties, who have learned to
dress and to move and to please the eye and ear, and whose abodes
provide their guests not only with rich food and drink and spacious
rooms, but surround them with an atmosphere of taste and distinction as
well. And when you see people with a fine title or great riches
commanding no prestige, you may know it is because in themselves they
have failed to come up to the standard of what the best society
requires. It is also the fashion to say wealth is necessary to a
position in society. It may be, if you are only trying to enter it, but
it is certainly not the case if you have a right to your position, and
are already there. Then, if you have just a sufficiency to swim with the
tide, and are charming and agreeable in yourself, you can create a
position for yourself and be the desired guest at all the best houses.
My aim for you, Caroline, is that you should come out this May with
every chance to have a glorious springtime of life, and then marry the
nicest young man, and live as happily as is possible ever afterwards.
But you must not start with impossible illusions. Men are not angels,
but spoilt, attractive darlings! And very few come anywhere near the
heroes of romance. If you fall in love with one who may be of good
family and position but is much less rich than yourself, Caroline, do
not, when you are married, ever under any circumstances taunt him with
the fact, as, I am sorry to say, some of the rich American women who
have married Englishmen have done. Never insinuate or infer that the
money is yours, and therefore you are mistress of the situation. The
man, although he may forgive you, will never recover from the sting and
the humiliation, and you will have created a canker in his feelings for
you which nothing you can ever afterward do will heal. Remember that, if
you have married a man poorer than yourself, you did it deliberately and
because you were convinced at the time that what he had to offer you in
exchange was worth while accepting. In these days no one is forced into
marriage, least of all an heiress like you, Caroline. And nothing can be
meaner or more unladylike than to remind your husband that it is you who
hold the purse-strings. Where love is, there never should be any desire
to humiliate, and, when love flies away, friendship can stay, and
dignity and respect take his place.
If your husband has a fine spirit you will have wounded him beyond
redress by taunting him with your money, and, if he has a small mind,
you will have galled him into enmity, besides having fallen far short of
that respect for yourself which is the mainstay of my basic principle.
Never ask your husband questions. If you do, you may be certain he will
only tell you the truth when he feels inclined--and one day you will
find it out, and then think he is always lying. Do not worry him when he
is tired. Never tell him of the petty delinquencies of the servants.
Learn to manage these yourself. Do not be egotistical and talk about
yourself. Do not recount to him the better position or greater
pleasures enjoyed by your friends. But, on the other hand, do not be
meek and submissive and without character, pandering to all his
weaknesses. Hold your own opinions when they are just and right, and
from the very first day inspire him with regard for you as well as love.
Let everyone in your new home understand that you mean to deserve their
respect, and so will exact its observance. Whether people are respected
in their own houses or not lies entirely with themselves, and not with
the manners or characters of their relations and servants. You can be
feared and respected, or you can be revered and respected, or you can be
outwardly respected and inwardly despised. You will be well served in
the first case; you will be exquisitely served in the second; and you
will be cheated and mocked in the third. It lies with yourself which of
these you choose to call forth. You may think, Caroline, that,
considering you are only just coming out, I might be talking to you upon
lighter and more frivolous subjects; but, as you are pretty and an
heiress, the marriage question will crop up so very soon that I feel
that now, while you will still listen to me, is my only chance to
impress its importance upon you--because the lighter things are for such
a little time, and marriage is for so many years! But in my next and
last letter before I shall see you, I will revert to the ways of girls,
to give you your last polish before you make your curtsey to the King
and Queen in May.
So now I will say good-night, child.
Your affectionate Godmother,
E. G.
VI
APRIL, 1913.
As this is the last letter I shall write to you before we meet,
Caroline, I shall have to collect all the little things I want to say to
you which are much easier to write than to express personally. And so,
first, I shall begin by suggesting what you had better avoid. The whole
tendency (as I think I said in a former letter) of modern society is
toward rowdiness and vulgarity, and if one is very young and full of
spirits it is so easy to be led away into indiscretions when one sees
most of one’s companions doing the same thing. But it is very foolish
and not in our scheme to secure for you prestige and a brilliant
future, my child, so I shall be quite ruthless in what I am going to
say.
It is very much the fashion now to lunch and dine at restaurants; even
the most youthful débutantes go to them with their chaperons, or to
large boy-and-girl dinners before balls or theater parties, when there
may be only one or two of the mothers present. I must give you a few
hints as to what I notice is common and unattractive behavior on these
occasions. One can derive a cynical amusement from sitting quietly and
watching the entrance and exit of people in restaurants, so atrocious
are the movements of most of them. It is seldom that anyone seems to
remember that in public true distinction is shown by the quietest and
most dignified bearing. You will see women and girls flustering in,
dragging on their gloves and taking great strides, or waddling in these
very narrow skirts, all self-conscious and plainly aware that they are
being observed by those sitting on the chairs at the sides of the halls.
In a public place true breeding should give you the same repose as at
home, and all but your own personal acquaintances should be apparently
unobserved. So, Caroline, cultivate this unconscious bearing. Finish
your toilet, in the way of adjustment of gloves, etc., etc., before you
leave the dressing-room, and then walk easily and without looking about
you to join your party. And when you are at the table, do not lean your
elbows upon it! If you have this deplorable modern habit in your own or
intimate friends’ houses, for heaven’s sake leave it behind you when you
come out! To see a lot of--presumably--ladies lounging all over the
cloth, as they lean forward eagerly to talk to their _vis-à-vis_ or the
persons next them, is not an engaging sight, and only a few years ago it
would have been considered as branding them as belonging to another
world. Whatever laxity of _tenue_ has become habitual in private life,
surely you can realize that it is very cheap to indulge in it in public,
and that the fact that everything is cheap now is no reason for you, who
are starting in life, and wish to be distinguished, to follow the
fashion. There is another frightful thing numbers of people do as they
leave restaurants--you will see them twisting their tongues round their
teeth or making some movement of the lips which gives the impression
that they have hardly finished their meal as they walk out! It is
perfectly revolting. It seems horrible to have to speak of such things,
child, but one sees them happen so constantly that I am obliged to warn
you.
Try to walk through halls gracefully, without self-consciousness or
swinging arms; and when the dinner has begun, enter into the spirit of
it, and endeavor to be agreeable to your neighbors, but never forget
that you are in a public place, and that at other tables there are
strangers whom you do not know, and before whom you certainly do not
wish to make yourself of no account. I have seen boy-and-girl parties at
restaurants where, if one had not known the names of the actual people,
one would have presumed they were a set of young hoydens imagining
themselves at a village feast. All noisy or unrestrained behavior is
really very vulgar in any mixed company. I am sure you will agree with
me about this, Caroline, and, if you will give yourself time to reflect
what self-respect really means, you will discover that, if it is innate,
it will guide you better than any words of mine; and that even as an
acquired quality it makes the only infallible standard to judge the
expediency or inexpediency of certain conduct by. You may, if you are
petulant, retort, “Goodness gracious, if I have got to be thinking all
the time of how I am behaving, I shall be a stuck-up, unnatural thing,
and won’t have any fun!” Now, listen, Caroline. We will make the simile
that society is an operatic stage, or, to give a still more up-to-date
example, the Russian Ballet! A certain organized institution. It could
not go on if the dancers had not been taught at all and thought they
could cavort about as they pleased on the plea of being natural. The
higher the state of their training, the _more perfectly natural_ do
their movements appear. So you, before entering society, should learn
in such perfection all the technical part of polish that to do the right
thing comes naturally to you, and gives you time, so to speak, to
encourage your individual talent, and be a Pavlova or a Karsavina. But,
if you are only at the stage of the last-joined chorus-girl, you cannot
hope to dance the _pas seul_! Should you desire to be so perfectly
savage that you need never think if you are doing ugly and unattractive
things or not, then you have no business to try to enter society at all,
which is admittedly a civilized circle, with standards of behavior which
are the result of centuries of evolution. It is not a primeval forest,
where you can climb trees and roll on the grass at will! No one forces
you to enter society, but for heaven’s sake, if you do, decide to do it
well!
[Illustration: “_I wonder if you smoke, dear girl?_”]
I wonder if you smoke, dear girl? There would be no use in my saying
that I personally think it looks utterly unattractive to see a very
young girl puffing her cigarette, because I know that I am
old-fashioned and, in this, have not gone with the times--but such is my
opinion. Should you not have begun to smoke yet, Caroline, put it off as
long as possible, and, if you do take to it, let it be because you
really like it, not for a pose, as some girls do. If you have acquired
the habit already, be very careful of your teeth as you get older, and
to have your hair beautifully brushed both night and morning--the smell
of stale smoke in the hair and breath and clothes is so disgusting.
While we are talking of personal habits and such things you will notice
that quantities of girls are not particular about their hands in these
days. The outdoor games and the boyish carelessness about wearing
gloves have almost destroyed beautiful white hands, in the present
generation, and you will often see the ugliest housemaid’s fists upon
the “Lady Clara Vere de Veres,” whose mothers are famed for the beauty
of their own fingers. Try to counteract by care the inevitable effect of
outdoor games upon your hands, Caroline; use creams, wear gloves when it
is possible, and keep your nails nicely polished. Why let one good thing
spoil another? Games are good for the health, and pretty white fingers
are pleasant to the sight.
Indeed, whatever your personal disadvantages may be, use the greatest
intelligence and get art to remedy them; do not let them slide with the
casual idea that they are only youth, and that you will grow out of
them. I am staying in a hotel in the South at the present moment, where
there is an extraordinarily pretty young girl, whose mother has allowed
her to stoop and stand all crooked. Her stockings are wrinkled and, with
a snowy neck, her arms are red and blotchy, while she leans upon the
table and eats in a horrible manner, with bright-red paws, holding her
knife and fork ungracefully; and, last of all, her head is arranged with
that awful bundle of sausage curls which I warned you about! The mother
looks a charming woman, but evidently has not what the Americans call
the natural “horse sense” to see that her poor child is being shamefully
handicapped and will be so for years, until the necessity to remove
these drawbacks strikes her own intelligence.
But, to turn from material things, there is another curious wave over
society which renders women less attractive than they were, and it is
caused by their numerical supremacy. A large percentage of them are the
seekers, not the sought-after. They actually hunt men!--the mothers for
their daughters, the girls for themselves--so that the attitude of most
of the modern _jeunesse dorée_ is one of self-defence. They are so sick
of invitations being poured upon them, of being grabbed for this and
that, so wearied with girls flinging themselves at their heads, that
their manners have often become of an insolence that would not have been
tolerated twenty years ago. But who can blame them? I implore you,
Caroline, to remain an old maid twenty times over rather than so degrade
your sex! Lots of girls are frightfully eager about their partners,
ferreting them out and reminding them of their engagements. I am sure
you are not of this sort, child, but I am only telling you of all these
horrid ways, so that you may observe them and not be led into them
unconsciously by seeing them practiced by your companions. If you have
with modesty shown you are agreeable and desirable to the young men, you
will have aroused their hunting instinct, which is always longing to
find expression, especially nowadays, when they themselves have to play
so often the part of the hunted! If you find yourself not a success,
you must ask _yourself_ why this is so; you must not get nervous about
being left behind, and turn into a seeker! There are many girls who seem
very popular and get plenty of public attention, but who behave
themselves so that they are spoken of lightly by every young man. Would
such popularity be worth having, and what would it bring in a few years?
Not much happiness, I fear. For, even if one of these girls does marry,
she will not have earned the respect of her husband, nor will she have
controlled her own emotions or desires sufficiently to be able to
maintain any stable position in life. When I look back upon those of
this sort that I knew when I was young, I ask myself where are they
now? Some of them are weary old maids--some have made hole-and-corner,
still enduring, wretched marriages--and some have gone under and are
divorced and forgotten. “Look to the end,” my dear girl, is an excellent
motto to apply to everything, especially to any common little pleasure
of the moment.
After the first season or two, if a girl does not marry she will have
drifted into one set or another, and you can judge instantly of her
status and prestige by the men she collects round her. If for the reason
of not meeting some one whom you feel you really want to marry, or for
any other reason you should remain free for a while, try at least to
have for your friends only the best and nicest, because, as I have said
again and again, like draws like, and the best is not likely to be
eventually found in the second-best circle, and I want you to have _the
best_ in everything, Caroline. Do not, as some girls do, look upon
society as simply the means to the securing of a husband, for, although
I told you in one of my former letters the goal of a sensible girl is
matrimony, still she must come naturally to this state through having,
by her own charm and complete equipment, mental and physical, attracted
a suitable mate; she must not have in front of her marriage as a
necessity, and so be ready to grab any creature who may show himself
willing with her to enter the bond. But, again, real self-respect would
ward off any of these dangers, so, if you have it, Caroline, my advice
is unnecessary. The woman who secures a husband by maneuvers and
scheming--often against the poor fellow’s will--is perfectly certain to
secure unhappiness of some sort, as well as a certain degradation to her
spirit. There are several notorious cases of this kind in society which
you will be able to observe, Caroline.