Your Affectionate Godmother

Do not retrospect – do not anticipate. Go on from day to day enjoying the good things which fate has given you: ménage them like a careful housewife – use forethought – quite a different thing to anticipation! Recognize that you are happy and decide what makes you so, and how you can continue to employ the methods to keep this joyous state. Be perfectly calm, and believe that nothing can alter or interrupt the enchanting present. For do not forget – each one draws to himself or herself what his or her thoughts dwell upon. Those who lay up for a rainy day attract the rainy day as surely as those who always believe that good will come secure good. A very useful thing for you to do is to look round at all your young married friends, and see what niches they have carved for themselves in the world – which ones are considered and have prestige, which are treated as nobodies, which are laughed at or pitied. Then try to decide upon the grade in public opinion you would desire to occupy yourself, and what are the causes of your friends being in whatever places they are. You will get a number of advantageous hints if you do this before you embark upon marriage yourself.

You will find that simplicity, good manners, and absence of all pretense are things which attract everyone. You will be wise never to be drawn into a set one iota lower than the one you wish to shine in. Weed your acquaintances and remain faithful to your friends. Society is composed, so to speak, of three loops. There is the very common loop which, at its upper edge, slightly overlaps the one above it, so that the best of these common people will just be seen at the worst of the middle loop’s parties. The middle loop, in its turn, overlaps at its highest point the third and great loop, which never mingles with the first and lowest one. You, Caroline, will enter society by the best door, so see that you are not drawn to the lower edge of your loop, and so into the vortex beneath. A large section of the world rave and storm that people are snobs who desire to be in the best society, but they forget that it is entirely the most amusing, the most intelligent and the most desirable, and therefore a very natural goal for newcomers to aim at. The cleverest men go where they meet the cleverest and most entertaining women. And these are naturally to be found among the leisured classes, who have had time to polish all their attractions, who have had money enough to see the world and cultivate their critical faculties, who have learned to dress and to move and to please the eye and ear, and whose abodes provide their guests not only with rich food and drink and spacious rooms, but surround them with an atmosphere of taste and distinction as well. And when you see people with a fine title or great riches commanding no prestige, you may know it is because in themselves they have failed to come up to the standard of what the best society requires. It is also the fashion to say wealth is necessary to a position in society. It may be, if you are only trying to enter it, but it is certainly not the case if you have a right to your position, and are already there. Then, if you have just a sufficiency to swim with the tide, and are charming and agreeable in yourself, you can create a position for yourself and be the desired guest at all the best houses.

My aim for you, Caroline, is that you should come out this May with every chance to have a glorious springtime of life, and then marry the nicest young man, and live as happily as is possible ever afterwards. But you must not start with impossible illusions. Men are not angels, but spoilt, attractive darlings! And very few come anywhere near the heroes of romance. If you fall in love with one who may be of good family and position but is much less rich than yourself, Caroline, do not, when you are married, ever under any circumstances taunt him with the fact, as, I am sorry to say, some of the rich American women who have married Englishmen have done. Never insinuate or infer that the money is yours, and therefore you are mistress of the situation. The man, although he may forgive you, will never recover from the sting and the humiliation, and you will have created a canker in his feelings for you which nothing you can ever afterward do will heal. Remember that, if you have married a man poorer than yourself, you did it deliberately and because you were convinced at the time that what he had to offer you in exchange was worth while accepting. In these days no one is forced into marriage, least of all an heiress like you, Caroline. And nothing can be meaner or more unladylike than to remind your husband that it is you who hold the purse-strings. Where love is, there never should be any desire to humiliate, and, when love flies away, friendship can stay, and dignity and respect take his place.

If your husband has a fine spirit you will have wounded him beyond redress by taunting him with your money, and, if he has a small mind, you will have galled him into enmity, besides having fallen far short of that respect for yourself which is the mainstay of my basic principle.

Never ask your husband questions. If you do, you may be certain he will only tell you the truth when he feels inclined – and one day you will find it out, and then think he is always lying. Do not worry him when he is tired. Never tell him of the petty delinquencies of the servants. Learn to manage these yourself. Do not be egotistical and talk about yourself. Do not recount to him the better position or greater pleasures enjoyed by your friends. But, on the other hand, do not be meek and submissive and without character, pandering to all his weaknesses. Hold your own opinions when they are just and right, and from the very first day inspire him with regard for you as well as love. Let everyone in your new home understand that you mean to deserve their respect, and so will exact its observance. Whether people are respected in their own houses or not lies entirely with themselves, and not with the manners or characters of their relations and servants. You can be feared and respected, or you can be revered and respected, or you can be outwardly respected and inwardly despised. You will be well served in the first case; you will be exquisitely served in the second; and you will be cheated and mocked in the third. It lies with yourself which of these you choose to call forth. You may think, Caroline, that, considering you are only just coming out, I might be talking to you upon lighter and more frivolous subjects; but, as you are pretty and an heiress, the marriage question will crop up so very soon that I feel that now, while you will still listen to me, is my only chance to impress its importance upon you – because the lighter things are for such a little time, and marriage is for so many years! But in my next and last letter before I shall see you, I will revert to the ways of girls, to give you your last polish before you make your curtsey to the King and Queen in May.

So now I will say good-night, child.

Your affectionate Godmother,

E. G.

VI

April, 1913.

A S this is the last letter I shall write to you before we meet, Caroline, I shall have to collect all the little things I want to say to you which are much easier to write than to express personally. And so, first, I shall begin by suggesting what you had better avoid. The whole tendency (as I think I said in a former letter) of modern society is toward rowdiness and vulgarity, and if one is very young and full of spirits it is so easy to be led away into indiscretions when one sees most of one’s companions doing the same thing. But it is very foolish and not in our scheme to secure for you prestige and a brilliant future, my child, so I shall be quite ruthless in what I am going to say.

It is very much the fashion now to lunch and dine at restaurants; even the most youthful débutantes go to them with their chaperons, or to large boy-and-girl dinners before balls or theater parties, when there may be only one or two of the mothers present. I must give you a few hints as to what I notice is common and unattractive behavior on these occasions. One can derive a cynical amusement from sitting quietly and watching the entrance and exit of people in restaurants, so atrocious are the movements of most of them. It is seldom that anyone seems to remember that in public true distinction is shown by the quietest and most dignified bearing. You will see women and girls flustering in, dragging on their gloves and taking great strides, or waddling in these very narrow skirts, all self-conscious and plainly aware that they are being observed by those sitting on the chairs at the sides of the halls. In a public place true breeding should give you the same repose as at home, and all but your own personal acquaintances should be apparently unobserved. So, Caroline, cultivate this unconscious bearing. Finish your toilet, in the way of adjustment of gloves, etc., etc., before you leave the dressing-room, and then walk easily and without looking about you to join your party. And when you are at the table, do not lean your elbows upon it! If you have this deplorable modern habit in your own or intimate friends’ houses, for heaven’s sake leave it behind you when you come out! To see a lot of – presumably – ladies lounging all over the cloth, as they lean forward eagerly to talk to their vis-à-vis or the persons next them, is not an engaging sight, and only a few years ago it would have been considered as branding them as belonging to another world. Whatever laxity of tenue has become habitual in private life, surely you can realize that it is very cheap to indulge in it in public, and that the fact that everything is cheap now is no reason for you, who are starting in life, and wish to be distinguished, to follow the fashion. There is another frightful thing numbers of people do as they leave restaurants – you will see them twisting their tongues round their teeth or making some movement of the lips which gives the impression that they have hardly finished their meal as they walk out! It is perfectly revolting. It seems horrible to have to speak of such things, child, but one sees them happen so constantly that I am obliged to warn you.

Try to walk through halls gracefully, without self-consciousness or swinging arms; and when the dinner has begun, enter into the spirit of it, and endeavor to be agreeable to your neighbors, but never forget that you are in a public place, and that at other tables there are strangers whom you do not know, and before whom you certainly do not wish to make yourself of no account. I have seen boy-and-girl parties at restaurants where, if one had not known the names of the actual people, one would have presumed they were a set of young hoydens imagining themselves at a village feast. All noisy or unrestrained behavior is really very vulgar in any mixed company. I am sure you will agree with me about this, Caroline, and, if you will give yourself time to reflect what self-respect really means, you will discover that, if it is innate, it will guide you better than any words of mine; and that even as an acquired quality it makes the only infallible standard to judge the expediency or inexpediency of certain conduct by. You may, if you are petulant, retort, “Goodness gracious, if I have got to be thinking all the time of how I am behaving, I shall be a stuck-up, unnatural thing, and won’t have any fun!” Now, listen, Caroline. We will make the simile that society is an operatic stage, or, to give a still more up-to-date example, the Russian Ballet! A certain organized institution. It could not go on if the dancers had not been taught at all and thought they could cavort about as they pleased on the plea of being natural. The higher the state of their training, the more perfectly natural do their movements appear. So you, before entering society, should learn in such perfection all the technical part of polish that to do the right thing comes naturally to you, and gives you time, so to speak, to encourage your individual talent, and be a Pavlova or a Karsavina. But, if you are only at the stage of the last-joined chorus-girl, you cannot hope to dance the pas seul! Should you desire to be so perfectly savage that you need never think if you are doing ugly and unattractive things or not, then you have no business to try to enter society at all, which is admittedly a civilized circle, with standards of behavior which are the result of centuries of evolution. It is not a primeval forest, where you can climb trees and roll on the grass at will! No one forces you to enter society, but for heaven’s sake, if you do, decide to do it well!

I wonder if you smoke, dear girl? There would be no use in my saying that I personally think it looks utterly unattractive to see a very young girl puffing her cigarette, because I know that I am old-fashioned and, in this, have not gone with the times – but such is my opinion. Should you not have begun to smoke yet, Caroline, put it off as long as possible, and, if you do take to it, let it be because you really like it, not for a pose, as some girls do. If you have acquired the habit already, be very careful of your teeth as you get older, and to have your hair beautifully brushed both night and morning – the smell of stale smoke in the hair and breath and clothes is so disgusting. While we are talking of personal habits and such things you will notice that quantities of girls are not particular about their hands in these days. The outdoor games and the boyish carelessness about wearing gloves have almost destroyed beautiful white hands, in the present generation, and you will often see the ugliest housemaid’s fists upon the “Lady Clara Vere de Veres,” whose mothers are famed for the beauty of their own fingers. Try to counteract by care the inevitable effect of outdoor games upon your hands, Caroline; use creams, wear gloves when it is possible, and keep your nails nicely polished. Why let one good thing spoil another? Games are good for the health, and pretty white fingers are pleasant to the sight.

Indeed, whatever your personal disadvantages may be, use the greatest intelligence and get art to remedy them; do not let them slide with the casual idea that they are only youth, and that you will grow out of them. I am staying in a hotel in the South at the present moment, where there is an extraordinarily pretty young girl, whose mother has allowed her to stoop and stand all crooked. Her stockings are wrinkled and, with a snowy neck, her arms are red and blotchy, while she leans upon the table and eats in a horrible manner, with bright-red paws, holding her knife and fork ungracefully; and, last of all, her head is arranged with that awful bundle of sausage curls which I warned you about! The mother looks a charming woman, but evidently has not what the Americans call the natural “horse sense” to see that her poor child is being shamefully handicapped and will be so for years, until the necessity to remove these drawbacks strikes her own intelligence.

But, to turn from material things, there is another curious wave over society which renders women less attractive than they were, and it is caused by their numerical supremacy. A large percentage of them are the seekers, not the sought-after. They actually hunt men! – the mothers for their daughters, the girls for themselves – so that the attitude of most of the modern jeunesse dorée is one of self-defence. They are so sick of invitations being poured upon them, of being grabbed for this and that, so wearied with girls flinging themselves at their heads, that their manners have often become of an insolence that would not have been tolerated twenty years ago. But who can blame them? I implore you, Caroline, to remain an old maid twenty times over rather than so degrade your sex! Lots of girls are frightfully eager about their partners, ferreting them out and reminding them of their engagements. I am sure you are not of this sort, child, but I am only telling you of all these horrid ways, so that you may observe them and not be led into them unconsciously by seeing them practiced by your companions. If you have with modesty shown you are agreeable and desirable to the young men, you will have aroused their hunting instinct, which is always longing to find expression, especially nowadays, when they themselves have to play so often the part of the hunted! If you find yourself not a success, you must ask yourself why this is so; you must not get nervous about being left behind, and turn into a seeker! There are many girls who seem very popular and get plenty of public attention, but who behave themselves so that they are spoken of lightly by every young man. Would such popularity be worth having, and what would it bring in a few years? Not much happiness, I fear. For, even if one of these girls does marry, she will not have earned the respect of her husband, nor will she have controlled her own emotions or desires sufficiently to be able to maintain any stable position in life. When I look back upon those of this sort that I knew when I was young, I ask myself where are they now? Some of them are weary old maids – some have made hole-and-corner, still enduring, wretched marriages – and some have gone under and are divorced and forgotten. “Look to the end,” my dear girl, is an excellent motto to apply to everything, especially to any common little pleasure of the moment.

After the first season or two, if a girl does not marry she will have drifted into one set or another, and you can judge instantly of her status and prestige by the men she collects round her. If for the reason of not meeting some one whom you feel you really want to marry, or for any other reason you should remain free for a while, try at least to have for your friends only the best and nicest, because, as I have said again and again, like draws like, and the best is not likely to be eventually found in the second-best circle, and I want you to have the best in everything, Caroline. Do not, as some girls do, look upon society as simply the means to the securing of a husband, for, although I told you in one of my former letters the goal of a sensible girl is matrimony, still she must come naturally to this state through having, by her own charm and complete equipment, mental and physical, attracted a suitable mate; she must not have in front of her marriage as a necessity, and so be ready to grab any creature who may show himself willing with her to enter the bond. But, again, real self-respect would ward off any of these dangers, so, if you have it, Caroline, my advice is unnecessary. The woman who secures a husband by maneuvers and scheming – often against the poor fellow’s will – is perfectly certain to secure unhappiness of some sort, as well as a certain degradation to her spirit. There are several notorious cases of this kind in society which you will be able to observe, Caroline.

Supposing, by chance, that your tastes should turn to more serious matters than just the amusements of balls and games and the pleasures of your age, never be carried away by any fad or any new idea, as are numbers of girls who are so highly educated that they have come rather away from their more frivolous sisters. Fads are abnormal, and always show some unbalance. One often hears would-be deep thinkers announcing platitudes in cant phrases, and they frequently influence the young and impressionable. You have often, for instance, heard them making remarks about the “Rights of Man.” Now, ask yourself a common-sense question: What are the Rights of Man? You will find that the answer is that there are no such things! Man has evolved, and certain civilizations have conceded him certain privileges, but as he made no bargain with the Creator when he entered the world he cannot possibly have any “rights.” Servants have “rights,” because they are doing specified work for food and wages – they have made a bargain. All human beings have “rights” between themselves when they make an agreement of exchange. But man – just man in the abstract – can have no “rights” at all, for with whom did he make a bargain? From whom can he claim them? So, when you hear people using this phrase, you may know that they are talking balderdash and have not thought about the matter.

Woman has no “rights” either. The whole aspect of these things for woman is largely a question of geography, climate, and custom. One might say the only natural “right” a woman appears to have is to become a mother, because this seems to be her obvious mission in the scheme of things. But the necessities of civilization and the laws of her country have, above all things, restricted for her this privilege, except under certain given circumstances laid down by law. So you see, Caroline, when you come to analyze this phrase of “rights” it all falls to pieces! I have only referred to it by chance, as an illustration of the folly of using cant phrases. Never pretend to be clever in any way; be natural and easy, with that trained ease which is the highest attribute of breeding. Another defect girls often have is shyness, and very few people stop to analyze its cause. Shyness, when we have got down to the bedrock of it, is pure personal egotism. People are shy because they fancy others are observing them. If they were not so conscious of themselves they would not be obsessed with this idea; they would realize that they are probably not really very interesting, and may never have struck others’ consciousness at all. But no – the perpetual, ever-present perception of self makes them awkward, makes them wonder what effect they are producing, makes them nervous and the prey of every foolishness. Whereas, if they were not so sensitively occupied with their own feelings, they would do natural things without a tremor. I have no patience when I hear a woman in a great position being excused for stiffness and brusqueness by the plea of, “Oh, she is so dreadfully shy!” It is not real humility – real humility would not be conscious of self at all. It is vanity and egotism; and when seen in a grown woman casts a very poor reflection upon those who had the charge of her bringing-up from earliest childhood. If you are shy, Caroline, take yourself sternly to task, analyze what makes you so, and overcome it. Bashfulness and shyness are as great faults as boldness, and perhaps cause more unhappiness. The antithesis of shyness is bumptiousness, and this also comes from egotism; it is a different expression of the same fundamental fault. Try to eradicate the root if you have a tendency to either of its demonstrations.

There are all sorts of modern philosophers (in petticoats mostly, but still some of them are men!) who, with more or less subtle reasoning, are trying to inculcate an idea of the necessity of individualism in all women. They urge every unit to express her individuality, with the result that the average female, who is little higher than the animal world in intelligence, and not half so endowed with instinct, is becoming a perfect bore! She has not the sense to see that, if she were really gifted, nothing on earth could keep her from being individual, and that, if she is not so, to try to push forward her commonplace ideas only clogs the wheels of progress for the general company. Numbers of foolish feather-brains, bitten with the idea that they have this high mission of showing their individuality, have upset all possibility of their own happiness and that of their families. Numbers of the poor suffragettes are composed of these. The mass of women could not have been intended to be individual by the laws of Nature – not of man – and the few who are highly gifted have unconsciously been raised on pedestals without their own effort. These are the first to comprehend that it is necessary to look facts straight in the face, and to realize that when it comes to the last stand, no matter what laws are made, man will still be the master, through physical force. And oh! it would be perfectly frightful, would it not, Caroline, dear? if we got back to a state where men were obliged to club us to get their own way!

I am talking of this because I have often in these letters urged you to acquire prestige through individuality, so I must explain, that you may not misunderstand me. The thing I have been suggesting for you is social, the individuality which exquisite manners and courtesy and understanding can alone graft upon your natural talents and careful education. Any other sort in a young girl turns to eccentricity. And if when I see you I perceive that, though sweet and well educated, you are still of a commonplace turn of mind, I shall desist from teaching you to be a personage, but encourage you to take sensible pleasure in the things suitable to your brain capacity; and so you will become a happy little wife and a valuable atom of the community of England’s best society.