Quite unconscious of any such prescribed routine being the "thing"

among my family circle, I was almost stupefied by the look of distracted horror which flashed over my step-mother's face, when, the week after my arrival, I shocked her sensitive good breeding by a coa.r.s.e betrayal of my unpardonable ignorance.

It was a perfect June day, flooded with a bright but not overwarm sunshine; the young leaves on the maple boughs outside my bed-room window were swaying gently against the lattice, and below in the freshly trimmed garden the flowers were unfolding their early beauty to the summer warmth.

I had sought the safe retreat of my room, that I might, as I had promised, write long and loving letters to some of my much-regretted school-friends. When all my preparations were ready, and I had dated the first of these effusions, I was disturbed by a timid knock at the door. I laid down my pen resignedly and went to open: it was the pert housemaid, who delivered "Mrs. Hampden's request that Miss Amelia would kindly begin to dress."

"Dress for what?" said I, in impatient surprise. "This is Tuesday, Miss," the pampered maid answered insinuatingly, "Mrs. Hampden will be at home."

"So will I, Janet," I interrupted hastily, "and my present toilet is quite good enough for the house."

With this rejoinder I closed the door a little forcibly, and went back to my writing. I had only time to trace--"My darling Ruby,"--when, without intimation or announcement of any kind, my step-mother burst into my room, with her hair half dressed, and her toilet jacket flying loosely about her,--

"Do you want to disgrace us in the eyes of these prattling servants, Amelia Hampden?" she began in a hoa.r.s.e undertone, beckoning towards the hall outside: "the idea of not understanding my message any better than that," she went on in a whisper of reproachful despair. "Anyone would know, that when you've been away so long, you will be sure to have people calling on you, so put away that"--she added imperatively, pointing disdainfully to my treasured writing materials--"and dress yourself. The Merivale girls, and the Hunters, and all those others will be here before you are half ready."

I obeyed in placid silence; this was not the first hint which circ.u.mstances had thrown out of what was before me, while I remained at home. We were very stylish, very fashionable people, it seemed, although I was so unworthy of sustaining my part of the reputation, in my insignificant opinion we were very silly and very empty-minded creatures, and it was with this very encouraging conviction that I proceeded to stow away my pen and paper, to renounce the rare pleasure I had counted upon for two days before that, and to prepare myself for the possible intrusion of some juvenile Merivales and Hunters.

Janet came in to dress my hair and fasten my new kid boots, and otherwise bore me with endeavors to beautify me for my reception. It was a task, however, that was soon ended, and half an hour later I was seated in the drawing room below listening pa.s.sively to the small talk of some very well dressed girls who had opened the list of my ceremonious callers.

Having never seen them before, my demeanor was naturally timid and restrained, they were two sisters, and the younger one did all or most of the talking. They were very well dressed, and altogether non-committal, as far as speech and manners were concerned, but our vocabulary of drawing-room chat very soon became exhausted, and with a quiet "good afternoon" they arose and pa.s.sed out.

As they left the drawing-room they were met at the door by two other young misses who, at sight of them, raised their chins considerably above their natural level, and swept in without condescending to bestow even an accidental glance upon them. From where I sat I observed all this quietly, and with an effort to suppress a smile of bland amus.e.m.e.nt, I arose and greeted my new-comers--the Merivales!

Alice glided towards me with an air of imposing consciousness, and thrust a tiny, gloved hand into mine, and then with a graceful gesture she turned towards her companion and murmured faintly, "my cousin, Miss Holgate--Miss Hampden."

I bowed and smiled, and directed them to convenient seats, the situation was becoming more and more trying to my inclination to laugh outright. When we were all three comfortably deposited in our chairs, Alice Merivale turned her beaming countenance languidly towards me and remarked that "it was a perfectly lovely aufternoon," and while I smiled my eager corroboration, her cousin surrept.i.tiously observed, that it was "fairly delicious."

Then followed exclamations over my long absence, and questions too numerous ever to require answers, they were much more finished talkers than their predecessors, and when I thought we had touched upon every subject which could interest us mutually, Alice asked in a most insinuating tone if I had "known Florrie Grant before I went away to to school?"

Florrie and Carrie Grant were the slighted heroines who had just gone out. Fully alive to the import of her question, I affected a most placid expression of countenance and voice, and answered that I had not.

"I thought so," she remarked with an incisive smile, looking significantly at her cousin, then changing her tone to one of most provoking haughtiness, she drooped her white lids over a daintily plush satchel she held between her hands and drawled out a languid

"How do you like her?"

I felt that I was taking in Miss Merivale's tone and words and meaning with a wincing suspicious glance. I was being initiated, and the sensation was so utterly different from anything I had ever experienced before, that my self-control suffered a momentary suspension, when words came to me I used them with a particular emphasis.

"I think I shall like her very much," I answered, "when I have seen more of her. I never like to judge people according to early impressions," I continued, looking straight at the ottoman before me, "because people so often appear to disadvantage at first," but my arrow fell flat to the ground. Miss Merivale had not enough ac.u.men to detect anything personal in the innuendo; resuming her incisive smile she exclaimed quietly

"Oh, but _some_ people you know, Miss Hampden, are always the same, they have only one set of manners, of course I don't mean to say that the Grants are any of these, indeed I _never do_ say _anything_ against _anyone_. Florrie, I believe, is a very nice little girl, in her set, of course I don't know much about her as _I_ have never met her anywhere."

"Oh, no! None of _our_ friends know her," Miss Holgate broke in with a relish.

The elder girl frowned at this indiscreet remark, and interrupted it with grave remonstrance, saying

"Hush, Edith! You shouldn't talk quite so plainly," then with a wonderful tact in one so young she lit up her face with a happy expression, appropriate to her change of subject, and asked:

"Where does Mrs. Hampden think of spending the summer, this year?"

I could vouch no information on this point, as, I had not troubled to put the question to my step-mother myself, and so, after relating to me in a somewhat confidential tone, all the plans and projects which her Mama and her Aunt Ada had arranged for their holiday season, and their strong temptation to try Riviere du Loup, where so many fashionable people were said to be retiring just then, she finally arose, and with an emphasized request that I would "run in" without the least ceremony, to see her at any time, she bowed herself most gracefully out of the room, followed by her younger and less sophisticated relative.

I need hardly say what turn the rising tide of my impressions and opinions took about this time. To one who had pa.s.sed from the cheerless, loveless guardianship of a worldly step-mother, into the tender hands of patient and devoted sisters, to become, instead of a wandering, uncared for waif, the object of the truest and holiest solicitude that ever animated Christian hearts, this hollow mockery of fashionable life was nothing more than a matchless absurdity.

Had I grown up to this, in the unpropitious atmosphere of my own home, I daresay such phases of existence would have come upon me quite naturally, and without my ever stopping to question their real or relative solidity. But the "twig" had been differently inclined, by hands more worthy of training tender, susceptible off-shoots. Where can frail young innocence find a safe, secure and profitable refuge, from the destroying influence of evil, if not within convent walls? It is there, or nowhere, that girlhood, growing, aspiring girlhood, ripens into a glorious womanhood. There, go hand in hand the development of mind, and what is more necessary, if possible for a woman, the cultivation of heart. Everyone who looks about him in the social world, and gives a moment of calm consideration to what he sees and hears, cannot but admit, that though surrounded by a vast field for active and profitable labour, and with multiplied favours of circ.u.mstances thrown in their way, our girls lead comparatively useless lives, as if they were a recremental fraction of the human race, than which, indeed, many are no better, since they choose to lead such lives as can be fruitful of no direct benefit to themselves or their fellow-mortals.

It is not because a woman is excluded (rightly or not) from the more public arena of active life, that her energies need become paralyzed and wasted. It is not because the popular idea of propriety would deny her the right or opportunity to do great things for society or for the state, in the same way as men are expected to do them, that she cannot work her own great or little wonders in a quieter, but yet more direct manner.

It is acknowledged that hers is the mission of the heart; it is admitted that her sphere is in the family, and what is the mightiest commonwealth in the world, but a family of families. Ah me! It is a dark day with humankind when the sphere of a woman's action lies rigidly between her toilet table and the drawing-room.

The proof that such limits as these are both unlawful and unnatural, is, that our women who are confined within them, are conscious in their hearts of the wrong they are doing the world and themselves.

Conscience is not yet an extinct, though it is fast becoming an unpopular and unfashionable faculty, and men and women play the Pharisee with a deep sense of their own worthlessness and littleness gnawing at their spirit all the while.

I had been taught all this in time, and as early as my first vacation at home, among the fashionable juveniles of my step-mother's circle, I had begun to submit my valuable precepts to profitable practice. My first callers taught me a very wholesome lesson which I have held upon the surface of my memory through all these years.

Whenever I have witnessed a repet.i.tion of that early experience, the past has come forcibly back to me, with all the golden admonitions of my school-days, and I have felt myself stimulated anew, towards the steady pursuit of those social virtues which are the outgrowth of Christian charity, and a generous, impartial discrimination.

I have met many Alice Merivales, since my youth, who cast their stylish shadows ominously over the lives of many a Florrie Grant, and I have tried to sustain the weaker one, whenever it was in my power, the evil, I regret to see, is unabating. A new generation of little maidens is springing up around us, are they, too, destined to follow the beaten track their elders have trodden so unworthily? Will they be taught these nice discriminations between wealth and no wealth? Must they, too, meet a struggling gentility with a haughty, overbearing carriage, and elbow out less independent aspirants, whom some capricious fortune has brought within their contact? Does one little star in the vault above shine less brightly or twinkle less gladly because myriads of others do likewise? After all, what vainglory need there be in accidents of birth or fortune. They are not virtually ours, they have been given to us, and rest upon a changing wind that, to-morrow, may waft them far out of our Reach or sight forever.

"All flesh is gra.s.s; and all its glory fades Like the fair flower dishevelled in the wind, Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream!"

To attack this evil, at its root, is to expose one of the most powerful defects of our times, for no one can deny that this spirit which prevails among so-called well-bred people, is the evident result of that "little learning" which is "a dangerous thing." Of this I became more strongly convinced as I grew older.

My summer vacation was not long in coming to an end. I had whiled away some happy hours, and days and weeks, forming fleeting pleasures and seeing novel sights. My brother Freddie had entered very sparingly into my pleasures, as our tastes were vastly different, and his health on the whole rather delicate, he was a pretty boy in a sailor costume, when I saw him after our long separation, with mild blue eyes and a pallid countenance. He was sickly looking, with an expression of helpless peevishness about his otherwise pleasing mouth; his hair was wavy and of a golden colour, and his hands were thin and white, like those of a baby girl.

His mother persuaded herself that in multiplying and dwelling upon his complaints, she was caring for him with affectionate solicitude, and to be told that he was not looking well, was enough to convince Freddie that his life was hanging upon a thread, and that he must swallow powders and pills without a question or a grimace.

One morning towards the end of August, about a fortnight before my return to school, I heard my step-mother remark in a fretful tone that "Freddie's old symptoms" were "beginning to threaten him again," and that she "must send for Dr Campbell to come and see him."

I looked up with some astonishment from the book which I was reading, and ventured to ask.

"Cannot papa cure him?"

"I suppose he could," she answered, "if he were not his father, but Freddie won't listen to his papa's directions, and cannot be persuaded to take the remedies he prescribes--besides," she continued apologetically, "when your father was away last fall and Freddie had a very miserable attack, I called in Dr. Campbell, and he cured him in a fortnight, he is very clever," she added with slow emphasis, straightening a fancy panel on the mantelpiece by which she stood.

There was silence for a few moments, as I went on reading.

"And he is by far the most popular person in the city," my step-mother broke forth again, sinking into a seat near the window and folding her arms I looked up, but did not close my book.

"Who?" I asked indifferently.

"Dr. Campbell, to be sure," she answered a little snappishly, piqued that I had not paid more attention to her favorite subject. Still unwilling to drop the topic without having done it fuller justice, she went on, half in soliloquy.

"He is not married either, and has the best practice here; besides being courted by everybody who is anything. I am confident that the Hunters, and those people, call him in for mere trifles, just to cultivate his friendship. I know that Laura Hunter is fairly wild about him--and she is a chronic dyspeptic, luckily," my step-mother added with a malicious chuckle.

"Poor girl!" I exclaimed with well feigned sympathy, "I should think she would not care to see any one she liked under such trying circ.u.mstances."

"Neither does she--_except Dr Campbell_--she digests him so well that her family would like to see her live upon him altogether."

I began to see that I was serving as a target for my step-mother's ridicule of something which wounded her jealous tendencies, she knew that I could make no retort for or against the absent ones at whom these sly missiles were being aimed. I knew nothing of the circ.u.mstances so broadly treated by her, and I therefore kept silent, and applied myself to my book with renewed interest, and left my step-mother mistress of the field--there was no glory in the conquest, to speak of.

Towards four o'clock of the same afternoon Freddie and I were seated upon the library floor, matching some very irregular blocks that, when rightly fitted together, would display to our eager eyes the vividly coloured representations of that cla.s.sic and time-honoured tale known as the "Death and burial of c.o.c.k Robin."