THE OLD-FASHIONED GIRL.
“Modest as morn, as midday bright,
Gentle as evening.”
(A girl described by the poet Andrew Marvell.)
[Illustration: _A MARVELL_OUS GIRL]
By the old-fashioned girl is not here meant the girl of a type extinct,
but the girl of a type still existing, if in less numbers than of old.
I have a sheaf of letters by this girl beside me. None of these letters
bears date earlier than 1893. One of them, written on Christmas morning
of that year, begins—
“To-day is just like a beautiful Spring morning, the crocuses and buds
showing above ground, and all the buds forward.”
A week later, the writer announces—
“The weather is so open that Eva was able to pick some rosebuds on
Christmas Day.”
Under date February 12th, 1894, there is the following—
“The kitten Sixpenny is getting plump on bullfinches which the gardener
shoots. They do a lot of damage to the fruit-buds.”
The same letter contains this communication—
“The violets and camellias are backward this year, but all the crocuses
and snowdrops are now at their best, and we daily examine daffodil
buds.”
“Jacob, a jackdaw,” is mentioned in a subsequent letter, where the
reference to him runs—
“Jacob, a jackdaw, has been lately acquired. He resides in a big
aviary, and sometimes has a rabbit put in with him to get change of
air.”
A girl who writes letters like that is a girl who would have been after
the heart of Gilbert White of Selborne.
The old-fashioned girl is sentimental in so far as to be sentimental
is to have a tender and susceptible heart, for her sentimentality is
not of that order the other name of which is mawkishness. In fact,
it is of a kind that justifies the singular assertion made by gentle
William Shenstone: “The French use the word _naïve_ in such a sense as
to be explainable by no English word, unless we will submit to restrain
ourselves in the application of the word _sentimental_.”
This sentimentality, the other name of which is _naïveté_ of feeling,
in the old-fashioned girl led her to say the other day to a woman whom
she loved, “I wonderfully admire you,” and _naïveté_ of feeling it
is that inspires phrasing so charming as this, which I cite from the
letter (date May 1st, 1894) of an old-fashioned girl: “It is four years
since I have seen you, my friend, except by letters.”
[Illustration: AN INFANT PHENOMENON
_There he’s the darlingest dearest cleverest, brightest little fellow
in the world. Yes he is._]
It has been said in the foregoing that the old-fashioned girl exists in
less numbers to-day than in days gone by; so far is she, however, from
being as uncommon as the great auk, that I who write this have only
to shut my eyes to see a long procession of old-fashioned girls pass
before me.
First passes Ann (in her own explanatory phrasing, “plain
_A-double-N_”), who always brings her letters to a close with “believe
me,” and uses a nominative of address in writing a postcard.
Next pass Elizabeth, Betsy, Bessy and Bess—no _Elsie_, mark you.
Elizabeth wears boots with toe-caps, and is, we who know her believe,
the last girl who will use the phrase, “canons of good taste.”
[Illustration: A VISITATION
_There Mrs. Bile I’ve brought you another little pie of my own making_]
Betsy wears in winter a crotcheted muffler and Ringwood gloves. She
always says at a visit’s end, “Now I must be going,” and generally
says that she has “paid a visitation.” This makes new-fashioned people
smile, and, as Betsy only says it when in merry pin, this pleases her.
Betsy is a wag in her old-fashioned way. Thus she always counts her
cherry-stones, and affects distress if they come to _never_. This also
makes new-fashioned people smile.
Bessy we call “the quotation girl.” To Bessy, coffee is “the fragrant
juice of Mocha’s berry brown,” and Bessy at the tea-table refers to
“the cups that cheer, but not inebriate.” Bessy will herself only be
described in a quotation—
“Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.”
Bess uses what we others call “dictionary words”—such words as
_pusillanimity_ and _titillation_. Bess—does this need telling?—hails
from beyond Tweed.
Next passes Susan, who says, “Papa and mamma,” when she does not say
“Father and mother.” The new-fashioned girl says “papa and mother.”
Susan, too, prefers the word “lady” to “woman,” and “gentleman”
to “man.” In fact, she has somewhat aristocratic leanings; but
condescension is no part of her manner, for she knows that politeness
levels up.
Next pass the Marys, some of whom are Pollys.
[Illustration: MINERVA
An old-fashioned girl]
Polly, number one, combines a love of cookery with a love of bookery,
to phrase the matter as a certain poet would have phrased it, and to
these loves she adds a third, the love of needlework. If you should
tell her that a good needlewoman makes a bad student, she will tell you
in reply that Minerva beat Arachne in the art of needlework. She is so
far from being a bad student that it is only part of her knowledge to
know that.
Polly, number two, is not learned at all, but is of marvellous
dexterity with her fingers. She should have lived in the days of spears
and spindles, some people say. These people are of those who have
nothing in their heads but a tongue.
Of the Marys called Mary, there passes first that Mary to whom, albeit
her home is London, a Monday Popular Concert is not “a Pop,” and to
whom a photograph is not a _photo_.
Next passes the Mary to whom an Ellen said—
“You must have been born grown-up, like a fly, Mary.”
To whom Mary: “What do you mean?”
“Why, don’t you know, goose, that flies don’t grow, that they—let me
think of the way it’s put in the books—emerge from the larva in a
perfect state?”
To which Mary, dreamily: “Do they? That’s very interesting.”
A less old-fashioned Mary might not have found a fact conveyed as that
fact was conveyed in a primary degree “interesting.”
The old-fashioned girl is not always handled tenderly by the
new-fashioned girl. “Here’s a description of you,” so sneers one
Muriel, and reads aloud from a book, “A young lady in the possession of
all the virtues which adorn the most amiable of her sex.”
To which the Mary sneered at answers, “No, no; that flatters me.”
Lastly, there passes Emma, the old-fashioned girl who heard lately with
amazement that (so the new-fashioned girl phrased the matter) “cut
glass is vulgar.”
“How can,” said Emma, “_glass_ be vulgar?”
Emma lives in a world in which not only is cut glass still in
estimation, but in which the word “vulgar” is used in a sense in which
it is inapplicable to glass.
Emma is very fastidious in regard to phrasing. She is never caught
using the form “different _to_,” and she follows the rule which
prescribes the use of “better,” where the ungrammatical say “best.” Of
her adjectives, which are few and carefully chosen, a favourite one is
“elegant,” which she uses elegantly. Her spelling has an old-fashioned
look. Thus she writes _shew_, _sew_, _ribband_ and _bason_. She prefers
_carven_ to “carved,” and, in regard to another past participle, she is
open to the gentle satire of the _Cornhill_ essayist, who wrote in 1885
of “very young ladies” what follows—
“They write first, ‘his health was drunk,’ and then, alarmed at
the apparent inebriety of that harmless past participle, alter it
incontinently to ‘his health was drank.’”
[Illustration: REDGAUNTLET AND BLUE-STOCKING A NOVEL COMBINATION]
Emma prefers the sound of “his health was drank” to that of “his health
was drunk.” Such archaisms as _to pen_ for _to write_, and _a braid
of hair_ for _a plait of hair_, are also in favour with Emma, though
her notions in style have undergone some modification since she wrote
her first English composition, which began, “I sit down to write an
essay.” Emma is at present engaged upon writing a novel in letter form,
modelled on Sir Walter Scott’s _Redgauntlet_. That is a secret. Emma
has many secrets. New-fashioned girls are said to have none.
Never believe it!
Perhaps the old-fashioned girl is seen to least advantage in a
new-fashioned school. The modern system of examination perplexes her.
It was not quite a dunce, but merely a bewildered old-fashioned girl
who wrote what follows in obedience to the injunction, “Comment on
the grammatical peculiarity in the sentence—‘Cromwell was by far our
remarkablest governor.’”
“_Carlyle did not know better English, or perhaps he wanted to make a
joke._”
Not that the old-fashioned girl is not sometimes a frank ignoramus.
This must be allowed to be the case when she defines—I cite here from
authentic documents—_phenomenon_ as “a very bad-tempered person,” and
_emolument_ as “great flattery.”
In dialogue with the new-fashioned girl the old-fashioned girl does not
always come off best, but once and again she scores, if only by the
utterance of a bold paradox. Take the following.
“I wish,” said the new-fashioned girl, “I was dead.”
“You are always wishing something impossible, Evelyn,” answered the
old-fashioned girl. “The moment you are dead you will be wishing you
were alive.”
Paradox of a kind less mordant and less moribund is contained in
the following, which I set down as the favourite exclamation of an
old-fashioned girl born blind—
“Ah, I see it all now!”
Sometimes the sorrows of the old-fashioned girl are of a kind
calculated to rouse the amusement of those who are of a newer fashion.
This is surely the case in the matter of one Ada, who writes—
“I have contracted the miserable habit of writing short words
backwards, putting ‘dab’ for ‘bad,’ and much more dreadful things than
that. I feel that in writing my own name I write it backwards, and that
it is only by happy accident that it reads all right. This comes from
a game which we have been playing, and which consists of naming words
that make sense spelt backwards. The boys like it (this will shock
you), because of the word _mad_.”
Useless were it to tell this Ada that the word which “mad” spells
backwards is one in which “the boys” may fairly take delight, meaning
merely, as it does, “a bank to confine water.” The stricken Ada knows
boys better.
[Illustration: ANOTHER INNOCENT]
(_To be continued._)
IN THE TWILIGHT SIDE BY SIDE.
BY RUTH LAMB.