p. 380 | A Charming Girl by Aunt Marjorie

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Jun 18, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 24.

A Charming Girl.

By Aunt Marjorie

WAS she charming? I cannot tell you, for I do not know enough about her to be sure. All girls are charming by right of their youth, by right of the fresh bloom and dainty brightness which are youth's dower and distinction, by right of the world's suffrage which lays honors at their feet. But some girls are more charming than others. I have my ideal and you, I presume, have yours. My ideal girl has good health, a good complexion, and gay spirits; she likes a brisk walk over city pavements, a merry canter up hill and down dale; a row on the lake does not exhaust her strength; nor does the vagrant bat or beetle, or the predatory mouse stealing across the floor, so frighten her that she screams. Indeed, my ideal girl never shrieks in an emergency, for she has cultivated presence of mind till it has become a second nature. She eats with appetite and sleeps without nightmare horrors. She has a cool head, a gentle hand with a clasp which means cordiality and confidence; her tones are low, her accents clear-cut as coins newly dropped from the mint; her laugh is a chime of bells, and her ready helpfulness is due to a wholesome interest in her fellow-creatures, to a healthful spirit, as to a body free from aches and pains.

I have known girls who were not possessed of high health and tempered nerves, who had been handicapped from their birth by inherited defects, or whom over-indulgent parents had done their best to spoil, through the period of childhood, by all sorts of indiscretion in the way of dress, diet, and amusements, letting them go to parties, when they ought to have been in bed, arraying them in silks and jewelry and bidding them sit still like dolls, when they ought to have been romping out-doors in plain prints and stout shoes; and giving them false standards of duty and artificial gauges for pleasure through the formative years of early life. Darling girls were some of these unfortunates; but they had not been started well, and they were lovable in spite of their training; not lovely because of it.

My ideal girl is unselfish, though she may not make a victim of herself to gratify the caprices of everybody around her. She is capable of real self-denial, and will at any time put aside her own plans and accept interruptions cheerfully, if she can thus oblige her parents or friends. I have known her to stay at home from a matinee, that her tired mother might go for a drive, it being impossible for both to leave home at the same time. I have seen her slip quietly away to Mrs. Smith's, at church time, when the day was fine and her pastor was preaching on a very attractive topic, and, not going herself to church, she stayed in Mrs. Smith's nursery and cared for a teething baby while the little mother went to the house of prayer.

I have known, not from her own sounding of trumpets, but on good authority, that she has given the price of a new pair of gloves to buy her brother the book which he has longed for, and which made the evening lamp and the home circle enchanting to him for a week. I have known her to repress the resentful word when annoyed, have heard her answer jest with repartee, and have seen how her very coming in at the door was as the entrance of sunbeams into a shadowy place. I could go on for the next hour describing her, and you, if you are as fortunate as I in the girls of your acquaintance, would be saying: "Why, this is Florence and that is Susie, or it is Trix or Mabel." For there are many delightful girls who tread softly where there are aged people or invalids, who never hurt your feelings, who come when you want them and go when you wish they would depart, and, somehow, oil the hinges and smooth the angles and take the sharp edges away from the intercourse of the family and society. They are peace-keepers as well as peace-makers.

What of the girl I began with? Pardon Aunt Marjorie if she grows garrulous and forgets where she started.

This girl was described by a relative in these words: "She never makes any trouble; she is never too hot nor too cold; she can sit or stand, or be alone or in company, or, wherever she is, she is happy and pleased."

The description spoke to me very suggestively. Perhaps the young lady was naturally amiable. It is a blessed thing to be born with an amiable disposition, to be free from fretfulness by that grace of God which conferred a sweet temperament and elastic hopefulness on one in the cradle. It is a more blessed thing to have attained through self-control the exercise of Christian endeavor and the discipline of every-day life, to that state of mind in which self is in the background and loving regard for others is always unconsciously in the front.

Nobody is ever charming who is merely negative, merely passive. Don't tell me that a person is not this, not that, if you desire to win for her my admiration. An admired person must have positive traits, must have excellences which are apparent. Still, when I hear of a girl who never dwells on any passing discomforts, who is never irritated or peevish, I fancy that she is not a mollusk; else her friends would not be enthusiastic in her behalf. I am reasonably certain that she has learned the golden rule of love and life—to be sympathetic, to have leisure for others' perplexities and tangles, to smile when smiles are expected, and to be gently pitiful in the house of mourning.

The girl I think charming is not weakly dependent. She will never be a dead-weight nor a drag on any man, be he her father, her brother, or her husband. A help, not a hindrance, a blessing, not a bane, this charming girl will develop into a charming woman, who will make her mark wherever she may be.

She will never be contented to vegetate, getting precisely the joy out of existence which the placid cow, ruminating in the meadow, considers the height of felicity. Every day, bringing to her its duties, will also bring its pleasures, and she will disdain to greet the dawn of day with a blasé indifference or a languid ennui. Progressive, because conscientious, she will not waste her energies on a round of frivolity nor spend herself in the pursuit of fashionable success. She will "keep up" her studies, will read, think, and talk, to some purpose. Conversation may be a lost art in some houses, but it is not beneath the attention of our charming girl to cultivate it as an accomplishment worth having, a graceful gift, second neither to beauty nor to youth. The really good talker, who can listen as well, is sure of a welcome in any circle.

The crowning charm of any girl's character is, I say this reverently, in its consecration to the highest and the best. It is the basest ingratitude in woman in a Christian land not to devote herself to Jesus, who has so elevated and rounded her life, so filled it with a sweetness, so dignified its environment, and so thronged it with opportunities and privileges. No woman, old or young, who lacks Christian consecration can be truly winning. We love the rose for its perfume, and piety is the perfume of womanly character.—Aunt Marjorie, in the Intelligencer.