A Woman of the World | Page 8

you to undertake the profession merely
because you need to earn a living. There are other things to be
considered besides your necessities. Fond as I am of you, I have the
betterment of humanity at my heart, too, and cannot feel it is right for
you to place yourself in a position where you will not be doing the best
for those dependent upon you that could be done.
I have given up hope of seeing mothers made to realize their
responsibilities. But I still have hope of the teachers. On them and their
full understanding of all it is in their power to do, lies the hope of the
world.
Therefore, my dear girl, I urge you to take up dressmaking or millinery
instead of school-teaching.
If you ruin a piece of goods in the making, you can replace it and profit
by your error. But if you mar a child's nature in your attempt to teach
him, you have done an irreparable injury not only to him but to
humanity.
If you saw a design started by a lace-maker, you would not think of
taking the work and attempting to complete it until you had learned the
art of lace-making.
Just so you ought not to think of developing the wonderful intricacies
of a child's mind until you have learned how.
It is all right to deliberately choose a vocation which gives us contact
only with inanimate things, but we have no right to take the handling of
human souls unless we are specially fitted for the task.

To Clarence St. Claire
Regarding His Sister's Betrothal

Your request, my dear Clarence, that I try to influence your sister to
change her determination in this matter, calls for some very plain
statements from me.
I have known you and Elise since you were playing with marbles and
rattles, and your mother and I have been very good acquaintances
(scarcely intimate enough to be called friends) for more than a score of
years. You are very much like your mother, both in exterior appearance
and in mind. Elise is the image of her father at the time he captured
your mother's romantic fancy, and as I recollect him when he died.
You were five years old, Elise three, at that time. Your mother lived
with your father six years in months, an eternity in experience. You
know that she was unhappy, and that he disillusioned her with love, and
almost with life. He married your mother solely for her fortune. She
was a sweet and beautiful girl, of excellent family, but your father had
no qualities of mind or soul which enabled him to appreciate or care for
any woman, save as she could be of use to him, socially and
financially.
In six years he managed to dispose of all but a mere pittance of her
fortune, and humiliated her in a thousand ways besides. His only decent
act was to die and leave her undisturbed for the remainder of her life.
Your uncle assisted in her support and saved the remnant of her
property, so that she has, by careful and rigorous economy, been able to
educate you and Elise, and keep up a respectable appearance in a quiet
way.
Of course it was impossible to retain her place among the associates of
her better days, and you know how bitter this fact has always made
Elise. Your sister has the physical beauty and the overwhelming love of
money and power which characterized your father. She has a modicum
of your mother's sense of honour, but has been reared in a way not
calculated to develop much strength of character. Your mother has been
a slave to your sister. Elise is incapable of a deep, intense love for any
man, and your mother's pessimistic ideas of love and marriage have
still further acted upon her brain cells and atrophied whatever impulses
may have been latent in her nature, to love and be loved. These

qualities might have been developed had Elise been under the tutelage
of some one versed in the science of brain building, but your mother,
like most mothers, was not aware of the tremendous possibilities within
her grasp, or of the effect of the ideas she expressed in the hearing of
her children. Neither did she seem to recognize the father's traits in
Elise, and undertake the work of eliminating them, as she might have
done. She has been an unselfish and devoted mother, and has made too
many sacrifices for Elise. At the same time, she has awakened the mind
of your sister to ideals of principle and honour which will help her to be
a better woman than her inheritance from your father would otherwise
permit. But now, at the age of twenty-one,