d the
emotions. Nature resents being ignored. If you do not cultivate her, she
will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece
of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other
rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women.
Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon
it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best
with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all
swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils
that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The
human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is
right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an
interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. You cannot keep minds in a
state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the
character which has been given either by the education of design or the
more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends,
in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and
objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in
creating.

A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational
purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is
always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all
connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies,
the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be
analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous
paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more
than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and
line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it
does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt,
characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character
_is_ assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to
material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved
broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the
emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to
an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the
best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.

People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasion