This discipline of promptitude in beginning and restraint at the end
will tell for good upon the quality of their writing.
But the work of the imagination may also betray something unreal and
morbid--this is a more serious fault and means trouble coming. It
generally points to a want of focus in the mind; because self
predominates in the affections feeling and interest are self-centred.
Then the whole development of mind comes to a disappointing check--the
mental power remains on the level of unstable sixteen years old, and the
selfish side develops either emotionally or frivolously--according to
taste, faster than it can be controlled.
There are cross-roads at about sixteen in a girl's life. After two or
three troublesome years she is going to make her choice, not always
consciously and deliberately, but those who are alive to what is going
on may expect to hear about this time her speech from the throne,
announcing what the direction of her life is going to be. It is not
necessarily the choice of a vocation in life, that belongs to an order
of things that has neither day nor hour determined for it, but it is
when the mental outlook takes a direction of its own, literary, or
artistic, or philosophical, or worldly, or turning towards home; it may
sometimes be the moment of decisive vocation to leave all things for
God, or, as has so often happened in the lives of the Saints, the time
when a child's first desire, forgotten for a while, asserts itself
again.
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