try and fortune-telling:--these are not safe
things to talk about, and I ask you as my particular wish not to do it,
though you are quite welcome to unburden your mind to me if you wish to do
so! I think your common sense will bear me out in not wanting them talked
about among yourselves, because you never know who may take it seriously
or what harm you may be doing, though as I have read "The Mysteries of
Udolpho" to you, you will see that it is not the subject, but the
indiscriminate talking which I object to!

But apart from wrong talk, what sort of silly talk are you likely to be
infected with at school? It is not unlikely that among a number of girls
there will be one with a hawk's eye for dress, who knows exactly how a
trimming went, and how long this or that has been worn; in fact, she takes
in every detail of the dress of each person she sees for a minute, and can
talk of it by the hour! She may have no harm in her, but she is first
cousin to a milliner's apprentice (and is mentally the poor relation of
the two, since the milliner notices these things as a part of business,
and very likely has other interests in life for her spare time). If the
girl wishes to prove herself of different family, she needs to put to
sleep the side of her that belongs to the keen-eyed young lady behind the
counter, by feeding other sides of her mind, and turning her powers of
observation on to other things.

I should like you to be faultlessly dressed outside, and I should like you
to be perfectly well inside; but I should not admire you if your chief
subject of conversation was the devices by which you arrived at the dress,
or the decoctions you took to arrive at the health.

Copy the flowers of the field, not only in prettiness, but in giving an
impression that you grow as naturally as they do! Make us feel that you
_could_ not have anything ugly or awkward or unbecoming about you. Your
dress and your rooms and your dinners should be perfect, but do not
entertain your guest with the mere mechanism of how you arrive at any one
of them. Give time and thought to this machinery of life--enough to
produce the right result, and then go on to the real interests, for which
they are only the stage. I do not want a sloven, but I want a girl who is
a real person and not a mere _poupee modele_ to show off dresses.

Petty gossip is the prevailing danger of any small community such as a
girls' school. Provincial gossip, Matthew Arnold would c