A TRUE LADY by Gail Hamilton

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · June 3, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 23

A TRUE LADY.

By Gail Hamilton

WILDNESS, is a thing which girls cannot afford. Delicacy is a thing which cannot be lost or found. No art can restore to the grape its bloom. Familiarity, without confidence, without regard, is destructive to all that makes woman exalting and ennobling.

The world is wide, these things are small; They may be nothing, but they are all.

Nothing? It is the first duty of a woman to be a lady. Good breeding is good sense. Bad manners in a woman is immorality. Awkwardness may be ineradicable. Bashfulness is constitutional. Ignorance of etiquette is the result of circumstances. All can be condoned, and not banish men or women from the amenities of their kind. But self-possessed, unshrinking and aggressive coarseness of demeanor may be reckoned as a State-prison offense, and certainly merits that mild sort of restraint called imprisonment for life. It is a shame for women to be lectured on their manners. It is a bitter shame that they need it. Women are the umpires of society. It is they to whom all mooted points should be referred. To be a lady is more than to be a prince. A lady is always in her right inalienably worthy of respect. To a lady, prince or peasant alike bow. Do not be restrained. Do not have impulses that need restraint. Do not wish to dance with the prince unsought; feel differently. Be sure you confer honor. Carry yourself so loftily that men will look up to you for reward, not at you in rebuke. The natural sentiment of man toward woman is reverence. He loses a large means of grace when he is obliged to account her a being to be trained in propriety. A man's ideal is not wounded when a woman fails in worldly wisdom; but if in grace, in tact, in sentiment, in delicacy, in kindness, she be found wanting, he receives an inward hurt.—Gail Hamilton.