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trust you are: I hope you will become more so. You may even have sound principles and good habits; but if people generally do not like you, it is because there is something wrong in yourself, and the best thing you can do is to study out what it is and correct it as fast as possible. Do not for a moment fancy it is because you are superior to other people that they dislike you, for superiority never, of itself, made a person unlovely. It is invariably a defect of some sort. Generally it is a defect arising from training, and therefore possible to overcome. For instance: two girls in the country have each a pony phaeton. One drives her sisters, her family, her guests, her equals, and never thinks of going outside that circle. Another does the same; but, more than this, she often takes the cook, the laundress, or the one woman who often is cook, laundress, housemaid, all in one. And to them the drive is a far greater luxury than to her own comrades, who would be playing croquet or riding if they were not with her. Now and then she invites some poor neighbor, she takes some young sempstress or worsted-worker to town to do her shopping, she carries the tired housewife to see her mother, she asks three little girls--somewhat crowded but rapturously happy--three miles to see the balloon that has alighted on the hill; she drives a widowed old mother-in-Israel to a tea-drinking of which she would otherwise be deprived. These are not charities. They are courtesies, and this bright-faced girl is sunshine in her village home and, by and by, when her box of finery is by some mistake left at the station, a stalwart youngster, unbidden, shoulders it and bears it, panting and perspiring, to her door-step, declaring that he would not do it for another person in town but Miss Fanny! And perhaps he does not even say _Miss_ Fanny--only Fanny. Now she could get on very well without the villager's admiring affection, and even without her box of finery; yet the goodwill of your neighbors is exceeding pleasant. Another thing Fanny excels in is the acknowledgment of courtesy, which is itself as great a courtesy as the performance of kindness. If she is invited to a lawn party or a boating picnic, whether she accept or not, she pays a visit to her hostess afterward and expresses her pleasure or her regrets; and she pays it with promptness, and not with tardy reluctance, as if it were a burden. If she has been making a week's visit away from
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