AUGUST 399 



August 29/. Several of my young friends complained 

 that the chapter headed 'Daughters' in my first book, 

 though it sympathised with the woes of childhood, was 

 addressed rather to mothers than to daughters. They 

 say : ' We. want a chapter about ourselves, on our own 

 difficulties and trials, on love and marriage, and the 

 proper conduct of life between seventeen and twenty-five.' 

 So now, partly from memory of my own experience (for 

 I was a girl once), and partly from observing others, I am 

 going to talk on these subjects as well as I can, only 

 referring as before to the well-to-do classes, the only ones 

 about which I know anything. Where I find that my 

 own thoughts have been expressed by others, I shall 

 deliberately quote ; and as these quotations will be from 

 the writings of both men and women, some mothers may 

 not think them suitable for the reading of very young 

 people. 



So far as I have been able to judge, the first difficulty 

 which most commonly presents itself to a grown-up 

 girl is her position with regard to her mother, no matter 

 how excellent that mother may be, and even when the 

 girl remembers the devotion she bore to her up to the 

 age of (say) fifteen or sixteen. When a girl is about this 

 age a barrier seems often to arise between them, usually 

 caused by some want of confidence on the girl's part. 

 The difficulty, however, is only aggravated if the mother 

 resents or is hurt by this reticence. George Eliot refers 

 to this subject with Titanesque touches. She says : ' We 

 are bound to reticence most of all by that reverence for 

 the highest efforts of our common nature which commands 

 us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnant of 

 the brute, its most agonising struggles with temptation, 

 in unbroken silence.' But, on the other hand, the same 

 author thus describes the downward career of one of her 

 best-drawn characters : ' Tito had an innate love of 



