The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX. No. 996, January 28, 1899 — John Shaqi
The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX. No. 996, January 28, 1899Various
History
The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX. No. 996, January 28, 1899
Various
Children's literature -- Periodicals
“When married I shall never know happiness until I have shown my
husband that I am master, and then I shall be miserable because I shall
despise him.”
Well-a-day!
This is the place perhaps in which to tell of the slaty-blue girl.
Figure to yourself a damsel in a slaty-blue dress and slaty-blue hat,
wearing slaty-blue gloves, and having slaty-blue eyes and slaty-blue
lips, and figure her to yourself as “footing slow,” to borrow a phase
from Milton, and as doing this as one of a party of us making a rush
for a train “already in.” And figure us seated in a third-class
compartment, a little child in which is drawing his finger down
the window-pane. To whom the slaty-blue girl says (as we phase it,
“dyingly”) from the end of the seat—
“Don’t, please. That gets on my nerves.”
The moody girl is hyper-nervous.
[Illustration: smelling to agony a genuine case]
Here is another story of her. She was my visitor, and I led her to a
seat and spoke of this and that. She listened absently, then said, as
she glanced at a penny bunch of sweet violets distant from her by the
length of a large room—
“Would you mind that bouquet’s being taken away? I smell to agony.”
Rather unamiable that, but not intentionally unamiable. Now there are
moody girls who are intentionally unamiable—Baubles, for instance. We
call her by that name, because she has the word “baubles” much on her
lips, and in sound it is not very remote from Barbara, which is her
baptismal name.
Baubles is always in deadly earnest; that one may be in lively earnest
she does not dream. Another thing; she knows that there is such a
thing as “a foolish face of praise.” She has still to learn that there
is such a thing as a foolish face of blame. Bauble’s face is her
misfortune. In the following I give a conversation which I once had
with another girl regarding her.
“She loves you,” said this other girl.
“Does she?” I asked, pleased, but surprised. “She looks at me as if I
were especially abhorrent to her.”
“She always,” was the answer, “looks like that at people whom she
loves.”
A girl like that is scarcely in the possession of her full reason, and
what shall be said of a girl like this? She met a woman of her friends
some little time since in the street, and responded to her greeting by
a stare of blank non-recognition. The following day brought an apology,
coupled with the intimation that she had moments when she could not bow.
[Illustration: The Anatomy of Melancholy
The vertebral column]
A case like that becomes interesting in connection with the anatomy of
melancholy. The girl who has moments when she cannot bow is suffering
from a form of the disease known in mental pathology as “impulsive
insanity.” The victims to this disease lapse into states of defective
control.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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