One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
she play on these or other bewitching strings of her sex, after
the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast of
Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded
meet an artful serenader, that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked
by their performances, and knows anthropologically
the nature behind the devious show; a sciential rascal; as little
to be excluded from our modern circles as Eve’s own old
deuce from Eden’s garden whereupon, opportunity inviting,
both the fool and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of
insular eulogy, and the sham one, are in a perilous pass.
Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant
utterly amid a world where the hints are hourly scattering
seed of the inklings; when vileness is not at work up and
down our thoroughfares, proclaiming its existence with tableau
and trumpet. Nataly encountered her girl’s questions,
much as one seeks to quiet an enemy. The questions had
soon ceased. Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there
is little to be learnt when a little is known: in populous communities,
density only will keep the little out. Only stupidity
will suppose that it can be done for the livelier young.
English mothers forethoughtful for their girls, have to take
choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble Old
England, that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious
things, which can be had but in semblance under the conditions
allowed by laziness to subsist, and so curst of its shifty
inconsequence as to worship in the concrete an hypocrisy it
abhors in the abstract. Nataly could smuggle or confiscate
here and there a newspaper; she could not interdict or withhold
every one of them, from a girl ardent to be in the race
on all topics of popular interest: and the newspapers are occasionally
naked savages; the streets are imperfectly garmented
even by day; and we have our stumbling social anecdotist,
our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently silly woman;
our slippery one; our slimy one, the Rahab of Society; not to
speak of Mary the maid and the footman William. A vigilant
mother has to contend with these and the like in an
increasing degree. How best?
There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated.
The girl’s intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it.
Since, as he argued, we cannot keep the poisonous matter
out, mothers should prepare and strengthen young women
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