more like a diseased goldfish. Look to it that what you are doing is
not merely toddling to a competency. Perhaps that must be your fate,
but fight it and then, though you fail, you may still be among the
elect of whom we have spoken. Many a brave man has had to come to it
at last. But there are the complacent toddlers from the start.
Favour them not, ladies, especially now that every one of you carries
a possible marechal's baton under her gown. 'Happy,' it has been said
by a distinguished man, 'is he who can leave college with an
unreproaching conscience and an unsullied heart.' I don't know; he
sounds to me like a sloppy, watery sort of fellow; happy, perhaps, but
if there be red blood in him impossible. Be not disheartened by
ideals of perfection which can be achieved only by those who run away.
Nature, that 'thrifty goddess,' never gave you 'the smallest scruple
of her excellence' for that. Whatever bludgeonings may be gathering
for you, I think one feels more poignantly at your age than ever again
in life. You have not our December roses to help you; but you have
June coming, whose roses do not wonder, as do ours even while they
give us their fragrance--wondering most when they give us most--that
we should linger on an empty scene. It may indeed be monstrous but
possibly courageous.

Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes. What says our
glorious Johnson of courage: 'Unless a man has that virtue he has
no security for preserving any other.' We should thank our Creator
three times daily for courage instead of for our bread, which,
if we work, is surely the one thing we have a right to claim of Him.
This courage is a proof of our immortality, greater even than
gardens 'when the eve is cool.' Pray for it. 'Who rises from
prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.' Be not merely
courageous, but light-hearted and gay. There is an officer