_could_ not have anything ugly or awkward or unbecoming about you. Your
dress and your rooms and your dinners should be perfect, but do not
entertain your guest with the mere mechanism of how you arrive at any one
of them. Give time and thought to this machinery of life--enough to
produce the right result, and then go on to the real interests, for which
they are only the stage. I do not want a sloven, but I want a girl who is
a real person and not a mere _poupée modèle_ to show off dresses.

Petty gossip is the prevailing danger of any small community such as a
girls' school. Provincial gossip, Matthew Arnold would call it--provincial
being one of his severest adjectives for the Philistines whom his soul
abhors,--by which he means that their talk is limited to their
narrow-minded local gossip, so that when a stranger comes from a larger
world, they have nothing in common. I think his use of that word marks his
French turn of mind;--parochial would be the better expression in England,
where the talk is very often literally parochial,--besides deserving the
word in its wider meaning, as describing talk which is full of
unimportant, local, and personal facts, instead of belonging to the larger
world of ideas.

English girls, as a whole, are supposed to be bad at talking--to giggle
among themselves, and to have nothing to say on general subjects. But,
besides this, there is a certain love of silly mysteries and secrets in
some girls, which is apt to be too much for their common sense.

Some girls are so keen to chatter, and make themselves interesting at any
cost, that they tell their family's private affairs or discuss the faults
of their nearest relations. I am sure you would all remember that any one,
with a grain of decent family pride, washes every bit of dirty linen at
home, and holds their tongue about family news till they are sure it is