p. 51 | A True Lady by Gail Hamilton

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 2, 1882

A True Lady.

By Gail Hamilton

WILDNESS is a thing which girls cannot afford. Delicacy is a thing which cannot be lost or found. No art can restore the grape its bloom. Familiarity without confidence, without regard, is destructive to all that makes women exalting and ennobling. It is the first duty of a woman to be a lady. Good breeding is good sense. Bad manners in a woman is immorality. Awkwardness may be ineradicable. Bashfulness is constitutional. Ignorance of etiquette is the result of circumstances. All can be condoned, and not banish men or women from the amenities of their kind. But self possessed, unshrinking, and aggressive coarseness of demeanor may be reckoned as a State's prison offense, and certainly merits that mild form of restraint called imprisonment for life. It is a shame for women to be lectured on their manners. It is a bitter shame that they need it. Do not be restrained. Do not have impulses that need restraint. Carry yourself so lofty that men will look up to you for reward, not at you in rebuke. The natural sentiment of man toward woman is reverence. He loses a large means of grace when he is obliged to account her a being to be trained in propriety. A man's ideal is not wounded when a woman fails in worldly wisdom; but if in grace, in tact, in sentiment, in delicacy, in kindness she should be found wanting, he receives an inward hurt.—Gail Hamilton.