Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls | Page 6

Helen Ekin Starrett
choose some specialty and acquire skill in its exercise before you can hope to earn any considerable wages or salary. While perfecting yourself in the specialty you will have abundant opportunity to observe that it takes patience, perseverance, and determination, to do any kind of work well. One great reason why so many fail of making any success in life is that they have not the power of sticking steadily to their work. They get tired, and want to stop; whereas the true worker works though he is tired--works till it doesn't tire him to work; works on, unheeding the numerous temptations to turn aside to this or that diversion. There are now so many fields of honorable and profitable employment open to young girls that it is only necessary for you to choose what you will do. But make a choice to do something useful and worthy of your powers. You will be happier, and you will be a better and nobler woman, for so doing. You will be spared the discontent and restlessness of spirit which characterize the girl with nothing in particular to do, and who often becomes on this account a nuisance to all earnest people around her.
In order to fulfill aright the duties of any relation of life, the first requirement the greatest necessity, next to a firm resolution and will, is good health. Without good health there is no substantial foundation for anything earthly. Good health is the fountain of human enjoyment and the greatest of earthly riches. It is the great beautifier; it is the great preservative of good looks. How strange, then, that so many girls are so careless, so provokingly careless, of this priceless blessing! How strange that they will wear clothing that they know tends to break down their health; tight corsets that compress the lungs and spoil the natural shape of the body; tight shoes that interfere with the circulation of blood, and make their noses and hands red, and give them predisposition to colds and coughs and nervous headaches, all of which put to severe tests the patience and affection of those around them. Good health is always attractive; ill-health, invalidism, nervousness, are very apt to be repellant. Better good health than beauty, if one were obliged to choose--which one is not, for good health is one of the chief elements of beauty.
So, if you aim first to be good and kind and intelligent and industrious and skillful, so that you may be fitted to guide and adorn a home should you be blessed with one, or to be fitted to shape your life to usefulness and independence if you never have a home of your own, and if in connection with these aims you seek to obtain and preserve good health, you will, so far as this life is concerned, "be thoroughly furnished unto all good works." You will become a noble woman, whose adorning will be not alone of the outward appearance, but of the inner life and of the soul--an adorning which, according to St. Paul, "is in the sight of God of great price."

LETTER IV.
PERSONAL HABITS.
My Dear Daughter:--The power of winning love and friends, which is such a precious possession to all young people especially to young girls, will, in connection with good behavior and good manners, depend very largely upon certain personal habits, chief among which are order, neatness, promptness, and cheerfulness.
The girl or woman who is personally disorderly and untidy in her room and dress puts a great strain upon the patience and affection of all those associated with her who are possessed of refined and cultivated tastes. In fact, I believe there is nothing so disenchanting, so contrary to ideal young womanhood as a lack of neatness and tidiness in person and dress. This wonderful physical organism with which we have been endowed depends for its perfection and health and attractiveness upon the care we give it. The teeth, the hair, the complexion, are all dependent for their beauty--and it is quite right that we should strive to make them beautiful--upon constant attention to those conditions which insure their health and perfection. And the most important of these conditions is cleanliness. At the present time, no young girl can hope for recognition or welcome in refined and cultivated society, upon whose teeth tartar and other discoloring deposits are allowed to accumulate; whose breath is not pure and sweet; whose hair is muggy and untidily kept; whose finger nails are neglected and dark at the edges. These things may seem trifles, but they are not, for they are the outward expression of an inward grace; all these marks really reveal character. An untidy girl may be talented and good-tempered, but she lacks one of the most essential qualities for gaining and retaining
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