Part 8 (1/2)
”Now is your study time; now is the time for you to be a perfect little daughter and sister, a perfect friend, a perfect helper in every way that a child may help. And when womanhood comes you will be ready to enjoy it and to do its work. It would be very sad to look back upon a lost or blighted or unsatisfying childhood.”
”Yes,” a.s.sented Marjorie, gravely.
”Perhaps you and Linnet have been reading story-books that were not written for children.”
”We read all the books in the school library.”
”Does your mother look over them?”
”No, not always.”
”They may harm you only in this way that I see. You are thinking of things before the time. It would be a pity to spoil May by bringing September into it.”
”All the girls like the grown-up stories best” excused Marjorie.
”Perhaps they have not read books written purely for children. Think of the histories and travels and biographies and poems piled up for you to read!”
”I wish I had them. I read all I could get.”
”I am sure you do. O, Marjorie, I don't want you to lose one of your precious days. I lost so many of mine by growing up too soon. There are years and years to be a woman, but there are so few years to be a child and a girl.”
Marjorie scribbled awhile thinking of nothing to say. Had she been ”spoiling” Linnet, too? But Linnet was two years older, almost old enough to think about growing up.
”Marjorie, look at me!”
Marjorie raised her eyes and fixed them upon the glowing eyes that were reading her own. Miss Prudence's lips were white and tremulous.
”I have had some very hard things in my life and I fully believe I brought many of them upon myself. I spoiled my childhood and early girlhood by light reading and castle-building; I preferred to live among scenes of my own imagining, than in my own common life, and oh, the things I left up done! The precious girlhood I lost and the hard womanhood I made for myself.”
The child's eyes were as full of tears as the woman's.
”Please tell me what to do,” Marjorie entreated. ”I don't want to lose anything. I suppose it is as good to be a girl as a woman.”
”Get all the sweetness out of every day; _live_ in to-day, don't plan or hope about womanhood; G.o.d has all that in his safe hands. Read the kind of books I have spoken of and when you read grown-up stories let some one older and wiser choose them for you. By and by your taste will be so formed and cultivated that you will choose only the best for yourself. I hope the Bible will spoil some other books for you.”
”I _devour_ everything I can borrow or find anywhere.”
”You don't eat everything you can borrow or find anywhere. If you choose for your body, how much more ought you to choose for your mind.”
”I do get discontented sometimes and want things to happen as they do in books; something happens in every chapter in a book,” acknowledged Marjorie.
”There's nothing said about the dull, uneventful days that come between; if the author should write only about the dull days no one would read the book.”
”It wouldn't be like life, either,” said Marjorie, quickly, ”for something does happen, sometimes nothing has happened yet to me, though.
But I suppose something will, some day.”
”Then if I should write about your thirteen years the charm would have to be all in the telling.”