Remembering my own reception of a similar surprise, therefore advise that the daughter should be consulted in every way about the room she is to inhabit, unless, of course, she has no tastes of her own, and does not care what the room looks like so long as she has it to herself; then the room can be made as pretty as the mother likes. But there are few girls nowadays who do not care for their rooms, and are not as eager as anyone else to make themselves a pretty nest that they may regard as their own, and not as a perch on which they rest on sufferance until they are pushed out by the on-coming juniors into the arms of the first man who appears in the least degree anxious to have her for a wife.
I do hope that, whatever else happens, the daughters of the household may never be sent away to schools, or urged at a high school to overwork their brains and go in for those wretched competitive examinations. I am no advocate for the higher education of women, for votes for women, for anything which shall take them out of the sheltered home atmosphere, where women alone can breathe comfortably and live properly, and force them into the arena of life; and I do hope mothers who may read this book will consider what they are doing when they force their girls forward, and delight in the hard work and successful examinations which ruin their constitutions, and make them irritable and nervous and old before their time. I know only too well that there are women who are compelled to work, but I shall always maintain this should not be; and, to return once more to the subject with which I began my chapter, I state boldly that neither would they be were the families of English people smaller, and were we less extravagant, less determined to snatch all we can from life, doing absolutely nothing for ourselves that we can get someone else to do for us. Why, I know myself one family of five or six daughters who, if their father died to-morrow, would not have 50_l._ a year, yet who go out night after night to balls, who take cabs at every moment, never saving a shilling, who are waited upon by half a dozen servants, and yet who ought to do the housework themselves, who ought to be content with a quarter of the gaiety they insist upon. The poor silly things even went to Court, though, Heaven knows, the Queen would have sent them back again had she known what their dresses cost--a price, moreover, that would never be paid--and who finally would have far more chance of happy marriage than they have now, when every man they know looks askance at their garments, and then at their father’s worried face, and avoids them, justly declining to put themselves in the noose which is round his neck, and which will surely kill him, even if he can keep his head above water for much longer. This case is the case of hundreds of families at present, and therefore I feel I cannot say too much about it, and I do hope mothers will therefore think a little more about their daughters, and endeavour to restore a little of the quiet and simplicity which are almost extinct in this rushing era of ours, and which can never be found among those who are cast out from the shelter of home and forced into competition--a competition that is as odious as it is unnecessary in most girls’ lives, and that would be altogether unnecessary were there fewer girls in the world, and were we content to spend one quarter of the money we do on all sorts of nonsense and on extra servants, who only make our daughters lazy and luxurious when they ought undoubtedly to be up and doing.