Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

It stands to reason that when parents give their children money to spend according to their own wishes and tastes, they are acting a great deal more unselfishly than when they spend on their children, however lavishly, only to make them do what the parents con- sider desirable. This giving freedom to children means a good deal more self-sacrifice on the part of the parents, and, as the unselfishness of one person is very apt to produce the selfishness of another, it is a question for each parent to decide whether the sacrifice had better come from the old or from the young. It is an undeni- able fact that the tastes of children are likely to be the reverse, rather than a repetition, of the tastes of their parents. In weighing these questions, however, you must always cast into the scale the importance of a true knowledge of the value of money, which nothing but practical experience can give. Few things bring such ruin, in every sense of the word, to the happiness of married life as the extravagant wife — the wife who runs up bills, and who amidst tears and penitence and promises not to do the same again, immediately does so. Can anything as much as this, short of actual immorality, bring a respectable woman so nearly to the level of the unrespectable ? z2 340 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN Strong advocate as I am for marriage, I do agree with Miss Frances Power Cobbe, ' That for a woman to fail to make and keep a happy home is to be a greater failure, in a true sense, than to have failed to catch a husband.' I have noted somewhere the following sentence, and I think it as true as it is lofty in tone : ' There is only one real power in this world for man or woman — the power given by character. It carries far more weight than talent does without it. The woman who cultivates unswerving rectitude, firm energy, and persevering good- ness, will become a centre and a factor in the lives of others, wherever her lot is cast. All round us we see such women forced by outside pressure into positions of comparative, if not positive, prominence, and they have no need to whine over the unalterable fact of sex.' The better a girl or a woman is treated by a father or a husband in the matter of money, the more heavily does the duty remain with her to remember that, after all, the money is only conditionally hers, and that no woman has a right to eat a man's food, dress with his money, enjoy his luxuries to the full, and then not in every way try to please him ; and certainly she should never do systemati- cally that which he distinctly disapproves. If she cannot persuade him, she must submit and do his will. No woman is really free who cannot keep herself ; and even if she earns her own livelihood, she has to submit to her employers. One can hardly write a ' note ' on girls and avoid the great subject of dress. Certainly let the young dress in the fashion, in order to be attractive ; for there is no doubt that, even if the fashion is ugly, to be dressed in the fashion looks smart. When I was young I was scolded for trying always to get the last new pattern from Paris. I used appealingly to remark, ' I can't be graceful, let me be smart.' There are always certain women who can DAUGHTERS 341