this girl to have possibly that man's blood in her veins,
certainly the aroma of his life floating around her, and the faultless
model of his demeanor before her, and not be the mirror of every grace?
Of how little avail is birth or breeding, if the instinct of politeness
be not in the heart. That last remark, however, must "right about
face" in order to be just. If the instincts be true, birth and
breeding are comparatively of no account, for the heart will dictate to
the quick eye and hand and voice the proper course; but where the
instincts are wanting, breeding is indispensable to supply the
deficiency. What one cannot do by nature he must do by drill.
Sometimes it seems to me that young girlhood is intolerable. There is
much delightful writing about it,--rose-buds and peach-blossoms and
timid fawns; but the timid fawns are scarce in streets and hotels and
schools,--or perhaps it is that the fawns who are not timid draw all
eyes upon themselves, and make an impression entirely disproportionate
to their numbers. I am thinking now, I regret to say, of New England
young girls. Where they are charming, they are irresistible; they need
yield to nobody in the known world. But I do think that an
uninteresting Yankee girl is the most uninteresting of all created
objects. Southern girls have almost always tender voices and soft
manners. Arrant nonsense comes from their lips with such sweet
syllabic flow, such little ripples of pronunciation and musical
interludes, that you are attracted and held without the smallest regard
to what they are saying. I could sit for hours and hear two of them
chattering over a checker-board for the pleasure of the silvery,
tinkling music of their voices. But woe is me for the voices, male and
female, that you so often hear in New England,--the harsh, strident
voices, the monotonous, cranky, yanky, filing, rasping voices, without
modulation, all rise and no fall, a monotonous discord, no soul, no
feeling, and no counterfeit of it, loud, positive, angular, and awful.
Indeed, I do not see how we New-Englanders are ever to rid ourselves of
the reproach of our voices. The number of people who speak well is not
large enough materially to influence the rest. Teachers do not teach
speaking in school,--they certainly did not in my day, and I have no
reason to suppose from results that they do now,--and parents do not
teach it at home, for the simple reason, I suppose, that they do not
know it