e and
regularity, you will be much tempted to slip through the day without the
safeguard of a life of Rule; but, until you _are_ the saints you are
_called_ to be, you cannot afford to do without this help. We must
remember the warning of St. Francis de Sales against playing at being
angels before we are men and women.

On the other hand, you will need to guard against the temptation to make
your rules unbending and inconsiderate, to follow your ideal, heedless of
the fact that you thereby become tiresome to your people. How often the
home people feel jealous of school, and say it has cut a girl off from her
home interests, that she comes back full of outside friendships and
interests and new principles. Of course she does; if not, what good would
school have done her? But she ought to feel how natural and how _loving_
is this (often unexpressed) jealousy, and, by sympathetic tact, to avoid
rousing it, and not to be always thrusting school interests down home
throats. The duty of a life of rule at home is all the more complex
because home pleasures are duties too; if it was only a question of
self-denial it would be plain sailing, but your mother likes you to go
out, and your brothers want you, and if you refuse to enjoy yourself it
hurts them: if you even betray that you would rather be doing something
else, you spoil their pleasure, for a "martyr" to home duty is a most
depressing sight to gods and men. And the complexity lies in the fact that
you enjoy going, and conscience pricks you every now and then because you
never read, and you seem to go through the day in a slipshod way, with no
definite rule,--no daily cross-bearing, no self-restraint to give salt to
the day. At school you have a definite duty of self-improvement set before
you, and everything urges you to follow it. This remains a duty when you
go home, but it is very hard to reconcile it with the many things that
clash--not the least of these being our own laziness when the help of
external pressure is taken away. You have had intellectual advantages, and
you will be downright sinful if you fritter all your time away over
flowers and tennis, and never read because you do not like to be thought
unsociable: you are bound to improve your talents, but take it as your
motto, that _rules should be iron when they clash with our own wishes, and
wax when they clash with those of others_.

Yet we must yield _sensibly_, and not allow our time to be needlessly
waste