Part 5

Teach by precept and example that wraps and rubbers should not be put on until after the benediction. If your boy should grow up to the dignity of door-keeper in the house of the Lord, he should know that extra seats should never be removed from the aisles, nor doors be opened, until the last “amen” has been reverently uttered.

I believe that reverence and a proper understanding of the meaning of the sacred hours of worship would be wholesomely inculcated by the practise of sitting down in silence for two or three minutes after the benediction, or long enough for any necessary things to be done, such as the orderly passing out of the congregation might require.

Good form requires that there be no loud talking, visiting, laughing, bustling, or confusion of any sort in the breaking up of a congregation. In fact, instead of a breaking up, it should be a melting away, each for himself seeking to hold in thought, and carry with him all that is possible of the subject which has been considered, avoiding everything which tends to dissipate or to divert the mind from its contemplation.

This is the good form which nominal Christians require and teach. It is only the form, if you please, at the best dead, by which the worldly professor seems to be trying to make up what may be lacking in real spiritual worship; but that very fact proves it to be more than ordinarily worthy of consideration and adoption by the most spiritual. Upon the same principle that our righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees should our courtesy and good breeding exceed that of the most cultivated people of the world.

That behavior which everybody recognizes as becoming the house of the Lord, is that which would most certainly distinguish Jesus if he should come in among us; and the true worshiper who will clothe himself with these gentle, Christlike graces of conduct will be no less truly a Christian, while he will certainly be more quickly recognized as such.

VIII.

One of the evils which the good-form code is intended to control is that of the money and gift obligations, and the part they play in the association of young people; and in this the burden of preserving the just balance falls upon the young woman, although it is equally necessary that both boys and girls shall be so instructed that they shall each contribute an equal share of that mutual protection which good form is intended to assure.

A sentiment still lingers in the social world—a relic of medieval gallantry—to the effect that a young man must grant anything that a lady asks, even if, to secure it, he must risk his life, or character, or the last “quarter” with which he was to buy his dinner. This asking on her part need not be really asking: it may be only suggesting, or consenting to accept. She may only exclaim, “Oh, wouldn’t a sleigh-ride be just too lovely for anything!” She may have become naughty enough, without intending any harm, to say this on purpose to make the boy whom she delights to tease begin mentally to count over his small supply of change to see if he can possibly afford the rig. Girls have been known to take a queer sort of delight in leading a young fellow on to spend his last penny, to contract a debt, and go hungry, because he did not bravely refuse to take the hints that were intended to lead him into expenditure such as he could not afford.

No girl who has been properly trained, or who has truth and the elements of womanliness within, will ever resort to any such expedient for her pleasure, but will keep herself from all or any such social entanglements as would lead to anything so base. She will not allow a young man to place her under obligation, even to the extent of car-fare.

Teach your growing daughter that to receive a gift of any sort from any boy or man outside of the immediate circle of intimate, well-known family friends, is dangerous, if not disgraceful. Gift-giving and gift-receiving has come to be a vice. It is often intended as a sly, covert method of buying you. Gifts are employed for “padlocking the mouth” of those who know something which, if told, might spoil some selfish or criminal plot; and this is by no means confined to Tammany Hall.

Many a girl has kept some dangerous bit of knowledge hidden in her secret thought, and has been compromised by it, simply because she had thoughtlessly accepted some bauble from some man whom she supposed to be a friend until, the ulterior motive being revealed, she discovered that the gift was a bribe, and its possession a confession of dishonor; and then she has found herself in a great strait between her desire to be free and yet to keep the trinket.

I had given a plain talk to a company of schoolgirls; and many questions had been passed up to me, in answering which I had touched some of these points. At the close of the meeting, a few girls lingered to speak to me, each waiting to ask some questions “all for herself alone.” So while the others waited at a safe distance, they came, one by one, to whisper their perplexities in my ear. How my heart was taken captive by those girls, as with shamefacedness, with trembling lips and burning cheeks, they asked me questions which were revelations both of the lack of early home teaching and of the methods by which an evil world had tried to make them wise!

“I have got afraid of a lovely necklace that my friend gave me,” said one of them. “I’ve wished a hundred times he hadn’t given it; but what in the world can I do with it?”

“Send it back to him,” I said; “tell him you know more now than you did when you accepted it, and that you can not keep it.”

“But that would make him furious. I—I—dare not make him angry.”

“Then if he is so dangerous, you certainly dare not have him for a friend. If he is worthy of your friendship, he will understand and respect you all the more for this course. If he is not worthy of your friendship, the sooner you find it out, the better.”

“O—but—,” and the poor girl burst into bitter weeping. Then after a few moments, with a sudden firm resolution expressed in her face, she dried her eyes, looked up at me, clasped my hands as if to hold herself by them, and said, “I’ll do it,—I’ll do it right off,—and if he wants to make it hard for me, he may. I’ve kept honest,—God knows I have,—and he knows it, though he hasn’t helped me, as he said he would.”

“He promised to help you?” I asked.

“Yes, he did; he said I could trust him; that he’d never let a girl be compromised in his company in the world; but if I had done, and gone, as he insisted, lest if I didn’t he would have been provoked, I should have been talked about long ago. I thank you so much. I’ll get rid of it. He may have his old necklace, and keep it to give to his wife.”

“That is right,” I said. “She is the only one who can wear or own it with safety.”

The young man with a good heart, who is well taught in that which is best in good form, will never offer to any lady outside his own immediate family circle any gift but flowers; and those in the most delicate unobtrusive manner, such as will leave her, in receiving them, absolutely free to pass them on to some hospital patient if she chooses. To make her feel, by even a look, that she is under any obligation to wear a flower because he sends it, is to rob it of its fragrance and beauty, and make it fit only for the dust heap.

Because of the possibilities which I have suggested, and many others to which they lead, good form requires that a young lady shall make it practically impossible for any man not intimately related to her to spend any money, or force any gifts, upon her.

IX.

I should not do my whole duty if I did not make some reference to the “holy kiss,” nor yet contribute what I can to enlighten the mothers who honor me by reading my book concerning the universal but almost unspeakable questions that are always coming into the minds of young people about this sacred form of salute. You may know as much about these questions as I do, perhaps more; but there is many a mother who never dreamed that they could infest any brain but her own, and she never dared speak of such a thing.

One girl came to me, her face suffused with blushes, but with a determined expression about her mouth, and said:—

“I am going to ask you something right out plain, because I think you will not laugh. I’ve never dared ask anybody yet, because everybody always laughs in such a mean way if you try to find out anything about such things; and I’d like to know how girls are going to know just what to do. Now it’s just this way: I am going with Charley, and he is a nice boy; he wants to do what is right, I know he does, but all the boys have such queer ideas about their ‘rights.’ When he takes me home from church or any place—and I’ve just got so I dread to have him; and sometimes I think I won’t go with another boy as long as I live, because, you see, when I go to say ‘Good night,’ he—he thinks I am so queer because I won’t let him kiss me. But I won’t; I never let anybody but my own folks. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s nice to do that way unless it’s somebody you’re sure of, and love very much. He says I’m queer; and he gets provoked, and says it’s his right, if he goes with me. Now I want to know—is it?”

“No; it is not,” I said, positively, and perhaps with a little flavor of indignation. “And no properly instructed young man would make such a claim. He is not to blame, of course,” I added more mildly, “for he is young, too; but your instincts are all right; they are true; they are of God who made the kiss, and gave it its own place in common human language. It belongs to the home, and to the purest Christian fellowship between man and man, woman and woman; to society, never.”

“Oh, I am so glad I asked you!” she said; “for I was sure my feeling about it was right. But you know one doesn’t like to offend one’s friend, and one doesn’t like to be called queer. But what does make boys act so,—good boys, too, for Charley is a good boy?”