408 MORE POT-POURRI 



travagant, as they are not pretty unless constantly 

 renewed and kept spotlessly whitej and that is what the 

 holder of the purse-strings will rarely agree to. White- 

 washed walls soiled by smoke look very unsatisfactory. 

 A paper will look cleaner after sixteen or seventeen 

 years of wear than whitewash does after two or three. 



August 29th. — Several of my young friends com- 

 plained that the chapter headed ' Daughters' in my first 

 book, though it sympathised with the woes of ehUdhood, 

 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 experi- 

 ence (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 quota- 

 tions will be from the writings of both men and women, 

 some mothers may not think them suitable for the read- 

 ing 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 



