, 1891-01-24
FASHION vs.. LOVE.
MRS. LESLIE WRITES OF THE TRAIN
ING OF A FASHIONABLE GIRL

novelist was to demonstrate that no wo-
man Of fashion had a heart, and that
girls trained in luxury and educated by
the example of fashionable mothers
could not possibly become good wives.
especially for poor men. But is this sol
Persons born aud bred in luxury have
their faults, but so do persons born and
bred in penury, and l do not know that
n class of faults is any more tolerabIe
or more likely to make a girl into a bad
wife than the other.
The fashionable girl, for instance, has
been used all her life to attendance, and
probably never has learned to mend her
own clothes, or to go and fetch what she
wants, or to wait upon anybody else.
She sees a thing in a shop, and having
plenty Of pocket money, or plenty of
credit in her fathers name, she orders it
sent home, and perhaps never looks twice
at it again. II she is properly brought
up she deYotes most Of her time and en-
ergy to study and the practice of va
rious accomplishments, which, with nee
essary exercise, so fills her day that she
really could not if she would learn any
thing Of practical matters-of the art Of
keeping a house, Of training servants or
Of doing without them, Of buying clothes
at the right time and to the best advan-
tage, of making those clothes or 80 re-
pairing and refreshing them as to
Max aud claithes
A'maistE goods the new.
OF If a girl so trained marries
a poor man she has a great deal both to
learn and to unlearn, and her capacity
for these new lessons will be the meas
ure of her ability to become a good wife:
But suppose such a girl marries a rich
mani We all know, especially in this
country, that money alone will not make
a comfortable home; it will hire ser
wants sometimes at tremendous wages,
but the air of this free country is fatal
TO servitude, and the man or maid who
while at home in England or Ireland
was the very incarnation Of obedience.
responsibilities and content, only re-
quires a few months in one of our cities,
with the advantage of reading the pa
pers before they reach the hands of the
family, and Of listening to the lessons of
their compatriots who have been her.
a little longer, before they imbibe the
principles of liberty and equality to such
an extent, that, unless the heads of the
house are well able to hold their w
position, they speedily lose it, and be-
come the servants rather than the rulers.
Now is a girl fresh from her school, or
even after some years of society life.
able to take and keep this position of
head Of a turbulent and revolutionary
of rvant simply because her hus-
band has the money to pay them?
OF course she is not, unless she has
had a mother so very unusually alive to
her responsibilities that she has laugh
her the art of housekeeping, in addition
to her school studies, and the require
ments of society; and such mothers are,
to say the least of it, uncommon.
SO our poor society girl is not by posi-
ton and education fitted to become the
wife either OF a poor man or of n rich
Is she then never TO be u successful
wife? Are both poor men and rich men
warned off from trying to appropriate
her delicate loneliness and dainty grace
to the establishment of that home for
which every man longs in his inmost
hearth
Nay, the Ease is not quite as bad "a
this for our dear society rosebuds and
half opened blossoms. There is n teach
er who can in quito a short course of
most delightful lessons teach the most
inexperienced girl, whather she he city
bred and luxurious, or whether she be
country bred and unsophisticated, to lay
aside all her previous habits and to ac-
quire n complete new set; to take up the
most tedious and distasteful tasks and
find them charmingi to like the things
she supposed she should abhor, and to
grow careless of what had been her very
breath of life.
His terms are high, to be sure, this
wonderful teacher of ours; he demands
even more than Shylock with his pound
of flesh, for he is not satisfied with less
than the whole being of his pupil-her
heart, her brain, her hands, her feet, her
will and her obedience; in fact, all that
makes her herself. The teachers name,
as you long since nave guessed, is Love,
dear, old, yet ever young, Dan Cupid,
who has been at work among us from
the day when this weary old world was
as fresh and young as the de6utdnte OF
yesterday.
And now the crucial question is, can
tho lAsnlOuhDle Bll, inc society girl,
take the course Master Love requires?
She has, perhaps, ''gone in" for the
higher mathematics, for Greek and even
Hebrew; she knows the principles of
navigation, -trigonometry and astron-
omy; she has strained her poor little
brain to its utmost capacity, aud is quite
fit to assume the chair of mathematics
at the coming college for the coming
woman, but is she able to learn Loves
sweet lessons and 10 graduate in his
SCHOOL,
Those old novelists and essayists, those
~compounders of gilded pills who write
moral tales for the young and novels
with an educational purpose, in fact, all
the class of theorists to whom l at first
referred, say no, she can't. They main
tain that a worldly life makes the whole
nature worldly; they say that artificial
habits, such as sleeping half the day and
waking more than half the night, so up
set and transform the natural tastes and
capacities that they languish and die,
and are supplanted by others adapted to
the new order OF things. If this is true.
a fashionable girl cannot learn of love
any more than a blind girS could truly