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Chapter 9 Database Design
261
Chapter 9
Database Design
Discussion Focus
What is the relationship between a database and an information system, and how does this
relationship have a bearing on database design?
An information system performs three sets of services:
• It provides for data collection, storage, and retrieval.
• It facilitates the transformation of data into information.
• It provides the tools and conditions to manage both data and information.
Basically, a database is a fact (data) repository that serves an information system. If the database is designed
poorly, one can hardly expect that the data/information transformation will be successful, nor is it reasonable
to expect efficient and capable management of data and information.
The transformation of data into information is accomplished through application programs. It is impossible
to produce good information from poor data; and, no matter how sophisticated the application programs are,
it is impossible to use good application programs to overcome the effects of bad database design. In short:
Good database design is the foundation of a successful information system.
Database design must yield a database that:
• Does not fall prey to uncontrolled data duplication, thus preventing data anomalies and the attendant
lack of data integrity.
• Is efficient in its provision of data access.
• Serves the needs of the information system.
The last point deserves emphasis: even the best-designed database lacks value if it fails to meet information
system objectives. In short, good database designers must pay close attention to the information system
requirements.
Systems design and database design are usually tightly intertwined and are often performed in parallel.
Therefore, database and systems designers must cooperate and coordinate to yield the best possible
information system.
What is the relationship between the SDLC and the DBLC?
The SDLC traces the history (life cycle) of an information system. The DBLC traces the history (life cycle)
of a database system. Since we know that the database serves the information system, it is not surprising that
the two life cycles conform to the same basic phases.
Suggestion: Use Figure 9.8 as the basis for a discussion of the parallel activities.
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What basic database design strategies exist, and how are such strategies executed?
Suggestion: Use Figure 9.14 as the basis for this discussion.
There are two basic approaches to database design: top-down and bottom-up.
Top-down design begins by identifying the different entity types and the definition of each entity's
attributes. In other words, top-down design:
• starts by defining the required data sets and then
• defines the data elements for each of those data sets.
Bottom-up design:
• first defines the required attributes and then
• groups the attributes to form entities.
Although the two methodologies tend to be complementary, database designers who deal with small
databases with relatively few entities, attributes, and transactions tend to emphasize the bottom-up
approach. Database designers who deal with large, complex databases usually find that a primarily top-down
design approach is more appropriate.
In spite of the frequent arguments concerning the best design approach, perhaps the top-down vs. bottom-up
distinction is quite artificial. The text's note is worth repeating:
NOTE
Even if a generally top-down approach is selected, the normalization process that revises existing
table structures is (inevitably) a bottom-up technique. E-R models constitute a top-down process
even if the selection of attributes and entities may be described as bottom-up. Since both the E-R
model and normalization techniques form the basis for most designs, the top-down vs. bottom-up
debate may be based on a distinction without a difference.
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Answers to Review Questions
1. What is an information system? What is its purpose?
An information system is a system that
• provides the conditions for data collection, storage, and retrieval
• facilitates the transformation of data into information
• provides management of both data and information.
An information system is composed of hardware, software (DBMS and applications), the database(s),
procedures, and people.
Good decisions are generally based on good information. Ultimately, the purpose of an information
system is to facilitate good decision making by making relevant and timely information available to the
decision makers.
2. How do systems analysis and systems development fit into a discussion about information
systems?
Both systems analysis and systems development constitute part of the Systems Development Life Cycle,
or SDLC. Systems analysis, phase II of the SDLC, establishes the need for and the extent of an
information system by
• Establishing end-user requirements.
• Evaluating the existing system.
• Developing a logical systems design.
Systems development, based on the detailed systems design found in phase III of the SDLC, yields the
information system. The detailed system specifications are established during the systems design phase,
in which the designer completes the design of all required system processes.
3. What does the acronym SDLC mean, and what does an SDLC portray?
SDLC is the acronym that is used to label the System Development Life Cycle. The SDLC traces the
history of a information system from its inception to its obsolescence. The SDLC is composed of six
phases: planning, analysis, detailed system, design, implementation and maintenance.
4. What does the acronym DBLC mean, and what does a DBLC portray?
DBLC is the acronym that is used to label the Database Life Cycle. The DBLC traces the history of a
database system from its inception to its obsolescence. Since the database constitutes the core of an
information system, the DBLC is concurrent to the SDLC. The DBLC is composed of six phases: initial
study, design, implementation and loading, testing and evaluation, operation, and maintenance and
evolution.
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5. Discuss the distinction between centralized and decentralized conceptual database design.
Centralized and decentralized design constitute variations on the bottom-up and top-down approaches
we discussed in the third question presented in the discussion focus. Basically, the centralized approach
is best suited to relatively small and simple databases that lend themselves well to a bird's-eye view of
the entire database. Such databases may be designed by a single person or by a small and informally
constituted design team. The company operations and the scope of its problems are sufficiently limited
to enable the designer(s) to perform all of the necessary database design tasks:
1. Define the problem(s).
2. Create the conceptual design.
3. Verify the conceptual design with all user views.
4. Define all system processes and data constraints.
5. Assure that the database design will comply with all achievable end user requirements.
The centralized design procedure thus yields the design summary shown in Figure Q9.5A.
Figure Q9.5A The Centralized Design Procedure
Conceptual Model
Data
Constraints
System
Processes
User
Views
Conceptual Model Verification
D
A
T
A
D
I
C
T
I
O
N
A
R
Y
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Note that the centralized design approach requires the completion and validation of a single conceptual
design.
NOTE
Use the text’s Figures 9.15 and 9.16 to contrast the two design approaches, then use Figure 9.6
to show the procedure flows; demonstrate that such procedure flows are independent of the
degree of centralization.
In contrast, when company operations are spread across multiple operational sites or when the database
has multiple entities that are subject to complex relations, the best approach is often based on the
decentralized design.
Typically, a decentralized design requires that the design task be divided into multiple modules, each
one of which is assigned to a design team. The design team activities are coordinated by the lead
designer, who must aggregate the design teams' efforts.
Since each team focuses on modeling a subset of the system, the definition of boundaries and the
interrelation between data subsets must be very precise. Each team creates a conceptual data model
corresponding to the subset being modeled. Each conceptual model is then verified individually against
the user views, processes, and constraints for each of the modules. After the verification process has
been completed, all modules are integrated in one conceptual model.
Since the data dictionary describes the characteristics of all the objects within the conceptual data model,
it plays a vital role in the integration process. Naturally, after the subsets have been aggregated into a
larger conceptual model, the lead designer must verify that the combined conceptual model is still able to
support all the required transactions. Thus the decentralized design activities may be summarized as
shown in Figure Q9.6B.
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Figure Q9.6B The Decentralized Design Procedure
D
A
T
A
D
I
C
T
I
O
N
A
R
Y
Subset A
DATA COMPONENT
Views,
Processes,
Constraints
Views,
Processes,
Constraints
Views,
Processes,
Constraints
Aggregation
Subset B Subset C
Verification
Conceptual
Models
FINAL CONCEPTUAL MODEL
Keep in mind that the aggregation process requires the lead designer to assemble a single model in
which various aggregation problems must be addressed:
• synonyms and homonyms. Different departments may know the same object by different names
(synonyms), or they may use the same name to address different objects (homonyms.) The object
may be an entity, an attribute, or a relationship.
• entity and entity subclasses. An entity subset may be viewed as a separate entity by one or more
departments. The designer must integrate such subclasses into a higher-level entity.
• Conflicting object definitions. Attributes may be recorded as different types (character, numeric),
or different domains may be defined for the same attribute. Constraint definitions, too, may vary.
The designer must remove such conflicts from the model.
6. What is the minimal data rule in conceptual design? Why is it important?
The minimal data rule specifies that all the data defined in the data model are actually required to fit
present and expected future data requirements. This rule may be phrased as All that is needed is
there, and all that is there is needed.
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7. Discuss the distinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches to database design.
There are two basic approaches to database design: top-down and bottom-up.
Top-down design begins by identifying the different entity types and the definition of each entity's
attributes. In other words, top-down design:
• starts by defining the required data sets and then
• defines the data elements for each of those data sets.
Bottom-up design:
• first defines the required attributes and then
• groups the attributes to form entities.
Although the two methodologies tend to be complementary, database designers who deal with small
databases with relatively few entities, attributes, and transactions tend to emphasize the bottom-up
approach. Database designers who deal with large, complex databases usually find that a primarily
top-down design approach is more appropriate.
8. What are business rules? Why are they important to a database designer?
Business rules are narrative descriptions of the business policies, procedures, or principles that are
derived from a detailed description of operations. Business rules are particularly valuable to database
designers, because they help define:
• Entities
• Attributes
• Relationships (1:1, 1:M, M:N, expressed through connectivities and cardinalities)
• Constraints
To develop an accurate data model, the database designer must have a thorough and complete
understanding of the organization's data requirements. The business rules are very important to the
designer because they enable the designer to fully understand how the business works and what role is
played by data within company operations.
NOTE
Do keep in mind that an ERD cannot always include all the applicable business rules. For
example, although constraints are often crucial, it is often not possible to model them. For
instance, there is no way to model a constraint such as “no pilot may be assigned to flight duties
more than ten hours during any 24-hour period.”
It is also worth emphasizing that the description of (company) operations must be done in
almost excruciating detail and it must be verified and re-verified. An inaccurate description of
operations yields inaccurate business rules that lead to database designs that are destined to
fail.
9. What is the data dictionary's function in database design?
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A good data dictionary provides a precise description of the characteristics of all the entities and
attributes found within the database. The data dictionary thus makes it easier to check for the existence
of synonyms and homonyms, to check whether all attributes exist to support required reports, to verify
appropriate relationship representations, and so on. The data dictionary's contents are both developed
and used during the six DBLC phases:
DATABASE INITIAL STUDY
The basic data dictionary components are developed as the entities and attributes are defined during this
phase.
DATABASE DESIGN
The data dictionary contents are used to verify the database design components: entities, attributes, and
their relationships. The designer also uses the data dictionary to check the database design for
homonyms and synonyms and verifies that the entities and attributes will support all required query and
report requirements.
IMPLEMENTATION AND LOADING
The DBMS's data dictionary helps to resolve any remaining attribute definition inconsistencies.
TESTING AND EVALUATION
If problems develop during this phase, the data dictionary contents may be used to help restructure the
basic design components to make sure that they support all required operations.
OPERATION
If the database design still yields (the almost inevitable) operational glitches, the data dictionary may be
used as a quality control device to ensure that operational modifications to the database do not conflict
with existing components.
MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION
As users face inevitable changes in information needs, the database may be modified to support those
needs. Perhaps entities, attributes, and relationships must be added, or relationships must be changed. If
new database components are fit into the design, their introduction may produce conflict with existing
components. The data dictionary turns out to be a very useful tool to check whether a suggested change
invites conflicts within the database design and, if so, how such conflicts may be resolved.
10. What steps are required in the development of an ER diagram? (Hint: See Table 9.3.)
Table 9.3 is reproduced for your convenience.
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TABLE 9.3 Developing the Conceptual Model, Using ER Diagrams
STEP ACTIVITY
1 Identify, analyze, and refine the business rules.
2 Identify the main entities, using the results of Step 1.
3 Define the relationships among the entities, using the results of Steps 1 and 2.
4 Define the attributes, primary keys, and foreign keys for each of the entities.
5 Normalize the entities. (Remember that entities are implemented as tables in an RDBMS.)
6 Complete the initial ER diagram.
7 Validate the ER model against the user’s information and processing requirements.
8 Modify the ER diagram, using the results of Step 7.
Point out that some of the steps listed in Table 9.3 take place concurrently. And some, such as the
normalization process, can generate a demand for additional entities and/or attributes, thereby causing
the designer to revise the ER model. For example, while identifying two main entities, the designer
might also identify the composite bridge entity that represents the many-to-many relationship between
those two main entities.
11. List and briefly explain the activities involved in the verification of an ER model.
Section 9-4c, “Data Model Verification,” includes a discussion on verification. In addition, Appendix C,
“The University Lab: Conceptual Design Verification, Logical Design, and Implementation,” covers the
verification process in detail. The verification process is detailed in the text’s Table 9.5, reproduced here
for your convenience.
TABLE 9.5 The ER Model Verification Process
STEP ACTIVITY
1 Identify the ER model’s central entity.
2 Identify each module and its components.
3 Identify each module’s transaction requirements:
Internal: Updates/Inserts/Deletes/Queries/Reports
External: Module interfaces
4 Verify all processes against the module’s processing
and reporting requirements.
5 Make all necessary changes suggested in Step 4.
6 Repeat Steps 2−5 for all modules.
Keep in mind that the verification process requires the continuous verification of business transactions as
well as system and user requirements. The verification sequence must be repeated for each of the
system’s modules.
12. What factors are important in a DBMS software selection?
The selection of DBMS software is critical to the information system’s smooth operation. Consequently,
the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed DBMS software should be carefully studied. To avoid
false expectations, the end user must be made aware of the limitations of both the DBMS and the
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database.
Although the factors affecting the purchasing decision vary from company to company, some of the
most common are:
• Cost. Purchase, maintenance, operational, license, installation, training, and conversion costs.
• DBMS features and tools. Some database software includes a variety of tools that facilitate the
application development task. For example, the availability of query by example (QBE), screen
painters, report generators, application generators, data dictionaries, and so on, helps to create a
more pleasant work environment for both the end user and the application programmer. Database
administrator facilities, query facilities, ease of use, performance, security, concurrency control,
transaction processing, and third-party support also influence DBMS software selection.
• Underlying model. Hierarchical, network, relational, object/relational, or object.
• Portability. Across platforms, systems, and languages.
• DBMS hardware requirements. Processor(s), RAM, disk space, and so on.
13. List and briefly explain the four steps performed during the logical design stage.
1) Map conceptual model to logical model components.
In this step, the conceptual model is converted into a set of table definitions including table names,
column names, primary keys, and foreign keys to implement the entities and relationships specified in
the conceptual design.
2) Validate the logical model using normalization.
It is possible for normalization issues to be discovered during the process of mapping the conceptual
model to logical model components. Therefore, it is appropriate at this stage to validate that all of the
table definitions from the previous step conform to the appropriate normalization rules.
3) Validate logical model integrity constraints.
This step involves the conversion of attribute domains and constraints into constraint definitions that
can be implemented within the DBMS to enforce those domains. Also, entity and referential integrity
constraints are validated. Views may be defined to enforce security constraints.
4) Validate the logical model against the user requirements.
The final step of this stage is to ensure that all definitions created throughout the logical model are
validated against the users' data, transaction, and security requirements. Every component (table,
view, constraint, etc.) of the logical model must be associated with satisfying the user requirements,
and every user requirement should be addressed by the model components.
14. List and briefly explain the three steps performed during the physical design stage.
1) Define data storage organization.
Based on estimates of the data volume and growth, this step involves the determination of the
physical location and physical organization for each table. Also, which columns will be indexed and
the type of indexes to be used are determined. Finally, the type of implementation to be used for each
view is decided.
2) Define integrity and security measures.
This step involves creating users and security groups, and then assigning privileges and controls to
those users and group.
3) Determine performance measurements.
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271
The actual performance of the physical database implementation must be measured and assessed for
compliance with user performance requirements.
15. What three levels of backup may be used in database recovery management? Briefly describe
what each of those three backup levels does.
A full backup of the database creates a backup copy of all database objects in their entirety.
A differential backup of the database creates a backup of only those database objects that have changed
since the last full backup.
A transaction log backup does not create a backup of database objects, but makes a backup of the log
of changes that have been applied to the database objects since the last backup.
Problem Solutions
1. The ABC Car Service & Repair Centers are owned by the SILENT car dealer; ABC services and
repairs only SILENT cars. Three ABC Car Service & Repair Centers provide service and repair
for the entire state.
Each of the three centers is independently managed and operated by a shop manager, a
receptionist, and at least eight mechanics. Each center maintains a fully stocked parts inventory.
Each center also maintains a manual file system in which each car’s maintenance history is kept:
repairs made, parts used, costs, service dates, owner, and so on. Files are also kept to track
inventory, purchasing, billing, employees’ hours, and payroll.
You have been contacted by the manager of one of the centers to design and implement a
computerized system. Given the preceding information, do the following:
a. Indicate the most appropriate sequence of activities by labeling each of the following steps in
the correct order. (For example, if you think that “Load the database.” is the appropriate first
step, label it “1.”)
____ Normalize the conceptual model.
____ Obtain a general description of company operations.
____ Load the database.
____ Create a description of each system process.
____ Test the system.
____ Draw a data flow diagram and system flowcharts.
____ Create a conceptual model, using ER diagrams.
____ Create the application programs.
____ Interview the mechanics.
____ Create the file (table) structures.
____ Interview the shop manager.
The answer to this question may vary slightly from one designer to the next, depending on the selected
design methodology and even on personal designer preferences. Yet, in spite of such differences, it is
possible to develop a common design methodology to permit the development of a basic
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272
decision-making process and the analysis required in designing an information system.
Whatever the design philosophy, a good designer uses a specific and ordered set of steps through which
the database design problem is approached. The steps are generally based on three phases: analysis,
design, and implementation. These phases yield the following activities:
ANALYSIS
1. Interview the shop manager
2. Interview the mechanics
3. Obtain a general description of company operations
4. Create a description of each system process
DESIGN
5. Create a conceptual model, using E-R diagrams
6. 8. Draw a data flow diagram and system flow charts
7. Normalize the conceptual model
IMPLEMENTATION
8. Create the table structures
9. Load the database
10. Create the application programs
11. Test the system.
This listing implies that, within each of the three phases, the steps are completed in a specific order. For
example, it would seem reasonable to argue that we must first complete the interviews if we are to obtain
a proper description of the company operations. Similarly, we may argue that a data flow diagram
precedes the creation of the E-R diagram. Nevertheless, the specific tasks and the order in which they are
addressed may vary. Such variations do not matter, as long as the designer bases the selected procedures
on an appropriate design philosophy, such as top-down vs. bottom-up.
Given this discussion, we may present problem 1's solution this way:
__7__ Normalize the conceptual model.
__3__ Obtain a general description of company operations.
__9__ Load the database.
__4__ Create a description of each system process.
_11__ Test the system.
__6__ Draw a data flow diagram and system flow charts.
__5__ Create a conceptual model, using E-R diagrams.
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_10__ Create the application programs.
__2__ Interview the mechanics.
__8__ Create the file (table) structures.
__1__ Interview the shop manager.
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b. Describe the various modules that you believe the system should include.
This question may be addressed in several ways. We suggest the following approach to develop a
system composed of four main modules: Inventory, Payroll, Work order, and Customer.
We have illustrated the Information System's main modules in Figure P9.1B.
Figure P9.1B The ABC Company’s IS System Modules
The Inventory module will include the Parts and Purchasing sub-modules. The Payroll Module will
handle all employee and payroll information. The Work order module keeps track of the car
maintenance history and all work orders for maintenance done on a car. The Customer module keeps
track of the billing of the work orders to the customers and of the payments received from those
customers.
c. How will a data dictionary help you develop the system? Give examples.
We have addressed the role of the data dictionary within the DBLC in detail in the answer to review
question 10. Remember that the data dictionary makes it easier to check for the existence of
synonyms and homonyms, to check whether all attributes exist to support required reports, to verify
appropriate relationship representations, and so on. Therefore, the data dictionary's contents will help
us to provide consistency across modules and to evaluate the system's ability to generate the required
reports. In addition, the use of the data dictionary facilitates the creation of system documentation.
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d. What general (system) recommendations might you make to the shop manager? (For example.
if the system will be integrated, what modules will be integrated? What benefits would be
derived from such an integrated system? Include several general recommendations.)
The designer's job is to provide solutions to the main problems found during the initial study.
Clearly, any system is subject to both internal and external constraints. For example, we can safely
assume that the owner of the ABC Car Service and Repair Center has a time frame in mind, not to
mention a spending limitation. As is true in all design work, the designer and the business owner
must prioritize the modules and develop those that yield the greatest benefit within the stated time
and development budget constraints.
Keep in mind that it is always useful to develop a modular system that provides for future
enhancement and expansion. Suppose, for example, that the ABC Car Service & Repair company
management decides to integrate all of its service stations in the state in order to provide better
statewide service. Such integration is likely to yield many benefits: The car history of each car will
be available to any station for cars that have been serviced in more than one location; the inventory
of parts will be on-line, thus allowing parts orders to be placed between service stations; mechanics
can better share tips concerning the solution to car maintenance problems, and so on.
e. What is the best approach to conceptual database design? Why?
Given the nature of this business, the best way to produce this conceptual database design would be
to use a centralized and top-down approach. Keep in mind that the designer must keep the design
sufficiently flexible to make sure that it can accommodate any future integration of this system with
the other service stations in the state.
f. Name and describe at least four reports the system should have. Explain their use. Who will
use those reports?
REPORT 1
Monthly Activity contains a summary of service categories by branch and by month. Such reports
may become the basis for forecasting personnel and stock requirements for each branch and for each
period.
REPORT 2
Mechanic Summary Sheet contains a summary of work hours clocked by each mechanic. This
report would be generated weekly and would be useful for payroll and maintenance personnel
scheduling purposes.
REPORT 3
Monthly Inventory contains a summary of parts in inventory, inventory draw-down, parts reorder
points, and information about the vendors who will provide the parts to be reordered. This report will
be especially useful for inventory management purposes.
REPORT 4
Customer Activity contains a breakdown of customers by location, maintenance activity, current
balances, available credit, and so on. This report would be useful to forecast various service demand
factors, to mail promotional materials, to send maintenance reminders, to keep track of special
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customer requirements, and so on.
2. Suppose you have been asked to create an information system for a manufacturing plant that
produces nuts and bolts of many shapes, sizes, and functions. What questions would you ask, and
how would the answers to those questions affect the database design?
Basically, all answers to all (relevant) questions help shape the database design. In fact, all information
collected during the initial study and all subsequent phases will have an impact on the database design.
Keep in mind that the information is collected to establish the entities, attributes, and the relationships
among the entities. Specifically, the relationships, connectivities, and cardinalities are shaped by the
business rules that are derived from the information collected by the designer.
Sample questions and their likely impact on the design might be:
• Do you want to develop the database for all departments at once, or do you want to design and
implement the database for one department at a time?
• How will the design approach affect the design process? (In other words, assess top-down vs.
bottom-up, centralized or decentralized, system scope and boundaries.)
• Do you want to develop one module at a time, or do you want an integrated system? (Inventory,
production, shipping, billing, etc.)
• Do you want to keep track of the nuts and bolts by lot number, production shift, type, and
department? Impact: conceptual and logical database design.
• Do you want to keep track of the suppliers of each batch of raw material used in the production
of the nuts and bolts? Impact: conceptual and logical database design. E-R model.
• Do you want to keep track of the customers who received the batches of nuts and bolts? Impact:
conceptual and logical database design. ER model.
• What reports will you require, what will be the specific reporting requirements, and to whom
will these reports be distributed?
The answers to such questions affect the conceptual and logical database design, the database’s
implementation, its testing, and its subsequent operation.
a. What do you envision the SDLC to be?
The SDLC is not a function of the information collected. Regardless of the extent of the design or its
specific implementation, the SDLC phases remain:
PLANNING
Initial assessment
Feasibility study
ANALYSIS
User requirements
Study of existing systems
Logical system design
DETAILED SYSTEMS DESIGN
Detailed system specifications
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IMPLEMENTATION
Coding, testing, debugging
Installation, fine-tuning
MAINTENANCE
Evaluation
Maintenance
Enhancements
b. What do you envision the DBLC to be?
As is true for the SDLC, the DBLC is not a function of the kind and extent of the collected
information. Thus, the DBLC phases and their activities remain as shown:
DATABASE INITIAL STUDY
Analyze the company situation
Define problems and constraints
Define objectives
Define scope and boundaries
DATABASE DESIGN
Create the conceptual design
Create the logical design
create the physical design
IMPLEMENTATION AND LOADING
Install the DBMS
Create the database(s)
Load or convert the data
TESTING AND EVALUATION
Test the database
Fine-tune the database
Evaluate the database and its application programs
OPERATION
Produce the required information flow
MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION
Introduce changes
Make enhancements
3. Suppose you perform the same functions noted in Problem 2 for a larger warehousing operation.
How are the two sets of procedures similar? How and why are they different?
The development of an information system will differ in the approach and philosophy used. More
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precisely, the designer team will probably be formed by a group of system analysts and may decide to
use a decentralized approach to database design.
Also, as is true for any organization, the system scope and constraints may be very different for different
systems. Therefore, designers may opt to use different techniques at different stages. For example, the
database initial study phase may include separate studies carried out by separate design teams at several
geographically distant locations. Each of the findings of the design teams will later be integrated to
identify the main problems, solutions, and opportunities that will guide the design and development of
the system.
4. Using the same procedures and concepts employed in Problem 1, how would you create an
information system for the Tiny College example in Chapter 4?
Tiny College is a medium-sized educational institution that uses many database-intensive operations,
such as student registration, academic administration, inventory management, and payroll. To create an
information system, first perform an initial database study to determine the information system's
objectives.
Next, study Tiny College's operations and processes (flow of data) to identify the main problems,
constraints, and opportunities. A precise definition of the main problems and constraints will enable the
designer to make sure that the design improves Tiny College's operational efficiency. An improvement
in operational efficiency is likely to create opportunities to provide new services that will enhance Tiny
College's competitive position.
After the initial database study is done and the alternative solutions are presented, the end users
ultimately decide which one of the probable solutions is most appropriate for Tiny College. Keep in
mind that the development of a system this size will probably involve people who have quite different
backgrounds. For example, it is likely that the designer must work with people who play a managerial
role in communications and local area networks, as well as with the "troops in the trenches" such as
programmers and system operators. The designer should, therefore, expect that there will be a wide
range of opinions concerning the proposed system's features. It is the designer's job to reconcile the
many (and often conflicting) views of the "ideal" system.
Once a proposed solution has been agreed upon, the designer(s) may determine the proposed system's
scope and boundaries. We are then able to begin the design phase. As the design phase begins, keep in
mind that Tiny College's information system is likely to be used by many users (20 to 40 minimum) who
are located on distant sites across campus. Therefore, the designer must consider a range of
communication issues involving the use of such technologies as local area networks. These technologies
must be considered as the database designer(s) begin to develop the structure of the database to be
implemented.
The remaining development work conforms to the SDLC and the DBLC phases. Special attention must
be given to the system design's implementation and testing to ensure that all the system modules
interface properly.
Finally, the designer(s) must provide all the appropriate system documentation and ensure that all
Chapter 9 Database Design
279
appropriate system maintenance procedures (periodic backups, security checks, etc.) are in place to
ensure the system's proper operation.
Keep in mind that two very important issues in a university-wide system are end-user training and
support. Therefore, the system designer(s) must make sure that all end users know the system and know
how it is to be used to enjoy its benefits. In other words, make sure that end-user support programs are in
place when the system becomes operational.
5. Write the proper sequence of activities in the design of a video rental database. (The initial ERD
was shown in Figure 9.9.) The design must support all rental activities, customer payment
tracking, and employee work schedules, as well as track which employees checked out the videos
to the customers. After you finish writing the design activity sequence, complete the ERD to ensure
that the database design can be successfully implemented. (Make sure that the design is normalized
properly and that it can support the required transactions.
Given its level of detail and (relative) complexity, this problem would make an excellent class project.
Use the chapter’s coverage of the database life cycle (DBLC) as the procedural template. The text’s
Figure 9.3 is particularly useful as a procedural map for this problem’s solution and Figure 9.6 provides
a more detailed view of the database design’s procedural flow. Make sure that the students review
section 9-3b, “Database Design,” before they attempt to produce the problem solution.
Appendix B, “The University Lab: Conceptual Design,” and Appendix C “The University Lab:
Conceptual Design Verification, Logical Design, and Implementation” show a very detailed example of
the procedures required to deliver a completed database. You will find a more detailed video rental
database problem description in Appendix B, problem 4. This problem requires the completion of the
initial database design. The solution is shown in this manual’s Appendix B coverage. This design is
verified in Appendix C, Problem 2.
The Visio Professional files for the initial and verified designs are located on your instructor’s CD.
Select the FigB-P04a-The-Initial-Crows-Foot-ERD-for-the-Video-Rental-Store.vsd file to see the
initial design. Select the Fig-C-P02a-The-Revised-Video-Rental-Crows-Foot-ERD.vsd file to see the
verified design.
6. In a construction company, a new system has been in place for a few months and now there is a list
of possible changes/updates that need to be done. For each of the changes/updates, specify what
type of maintenance needs to be done: (a) corrective, (b) adaptive, and (c) perfective.
a. An error in the size of one of the fields has been identified and it needs to be updated
status field needs to be changed.
This is a change in response to a system error – corrective maintenance.
b. The company is expanding into a new type of service and this will require to enhancing
the system with a new set of tables to support this new service and integrate it with the
existing data.
This is a change to enhance the system – perfective maintenance.
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c. The company has to comply with some government regulations. To do this, it will
require adding a couple of fields to the existing system tables.
This is a change in response to changes in the business environment – adaptive maintenance.
7. You have been assigned to design the database for a new soccer club. Indicate the most
appropriate sequence of activities by labeling each of the following steps in the correct order. (For
example, if you think that “Load the database” is the appropriate first step, label it “1.”)
_10__ Create the application programs.
__4__ Create a description of each system process.
_11__ Test the system.
__9__ Load the database.
__7__ Normalize the conceptual model.
__1__ Interview the soccer club president.
__5__ Create a conceptual model using ER diagrams.
__2__ Interview the soccer club director of coaching.
__8__ Create the file (table) structures.
__3__ Obtain a general description of the soccer club operations.
__6__ Draw a data flow diagram and system flowcharts.
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women who have studied the art thoroughly; and who are adepts in
the use of every weapon known—using each according to
circumstances and the nature of the victim, and using each with
deadly precision. From such may a kind Providence deliver us! As the
tender mercies of the wicked, so are the scientific flirts—the women
and the men who play at bowls with human hearts, for the stakes of
a whole life's happiness on the one side and a few weeks of gratified
vanity on the other.
It used to be an old schoolboy maxim that no real gentleman could
be refused by a lady, because no real gentleman could presume
beyond his line of encouragement. À fortiori, no lady would or could
give more encouragement than she meant. What are we to say then
of our flirts if this maxim be true? Are they really 'no gentlemen' and
'no ladies,' according to the famous formula of the kitchen? Perhaps
it would be said so if gentlehood meant now, as it meant centuries
ago, the real worth and virtue of humanity. For flirting with intent is
a cruel, false, heartless amusement; and time was when cruelty and
falsehood were essentially sins which vitiated all claims to
gentlehood. And yet the world would be very dull without that
innocent kind of nonsense which often goes by the name of flirting—
that pleasant something which is more than mere acquaintanceship
and less than formal loverhood—that bright and animated
intercourse which makes the hours pass so easily, yet which leaves
no bitter pang of self-reproach—that indefinite and undefinable
interest by which the one man or the one woman becomes a kind of
microcosm for the time, the epitome of all that is pleasant and of all
that is lovely. The only caution to be observed is:—Do not go too far.
SCRAMBLERS.
There are people who are never what Northern housewives call
'straight'—people who seem to have been born in a scramble, who
live in a scramble, and who, when their time comes, will die in a
scramble, just able to scrawl their signature to a will that ought to
have been made years ago, and that does not embody their real
intentions now. Emphatically the Unready, they are never prepared
for anything, whether expected or unexpected; they make no plans
more stable than good intentions; and they neither calculate nor
foresee. Everything with them is hurry and confusion; not because
they have more to do than other people, but because they do it
more loosely and less methodically—because they have not learnt
the art of dovetailing nor the mystery of packing. Consequently half
their pleasures and more than half their duties slip through their
fingers for want of the knack of compact holding; and their lives are
passed in trying to pick up what they have let drop and in frantic
endeavours to remedy their mistakes. For scramblers are always
making mistakes and going through an endless round of forgetting.
They never remember their engagements, but accept in the blandest
and frankest way imaginable two or more invitations for the same
day and hour, and assure you quite seriously when, taught by
experience, you push them hard and probe them deep, that they
have no engagement whatever on hand and are certain not to fail
you. In an evil hour you trust to them. When the day comes they
suddenly wake to the fact that they had accepted Mrs. So-and-So's
invitation before yours; and all you get for your empty place and
your careful arrangements ruthlessly upset, is a hurried note of
apology which comes perhaps in the middle of dinner, perhaps
sometime next day, when too late to be of use.
If they forget their own engagements they also ignore yours, no
matter how distinctly you may have tabulated them; and are sure to
come rattling to your house on the day when you said emphatically
you were engaged and could not see them. If you keep to your
programme and refuse to admit them, more likely than not you
affront them. Engagements being in their eyes moveable feasts,
which it does not in the least degree signify whether they keep on
the date set down or not, they cannot understand your rigidity of
purpose; and were it not that as a tribe they are good-natured, and
too fluid to hold even annoyance for any length of time, you would
in all probability have a quarrel fastened on you because your
scrambling friends chose to make a calendar for themselves and to
insist on your setting your diary by it.
As they ignore your appointed hours, so do they forget your street
and number. They always stick to your first card, though you may
have moved many times since it was printed, duly apprizing them of
each change as it occurred. That does not help you, for they never
note the changes of their friends' addresses, but keep loyally to the
first. It all comes to the same in the end, they say, and the postman
is cleverer than they. But they do not often trouble their friends with
letters on their own account, for they have a speciality for not
answering such as are written to them. When they do by chance
answer them, they never reply to the questions asked nor give the
news demanded. They do not even reply to invitations like other
people, but leave you to infer from their silence the acceptance or
rejection they are meditating. When they in their turn invite you,
they generally puzzle you by mismatching the day of the week with
the date of the month, leaving you tormented with doubt which you
are to go by; and they forget to give you the hour. Besides this, they
write an illegible hand; and they are famous for the blots they make
and the Queen's heads they omit.
A scrambling wife is no light cross to a man who values order and
regularity as part of his home life. She may be, and probably is, the
best-tempered creature in the world—a peevish scrambler would be
too unendurable—but a fresh face, bright eyes and a merry laugh do
not atone for never-ending disorder and discomfort. This kind of
thing does not depend on income and is not to be remedied by
riches. The households where my lady has nothing to do but let her
maid keep her to the hours she herself has appointed are just as
uncomfortable in their way as poorer establishments, if my lady is a
scrambler, and cannot be taught method and the value of holding on
by the forelock. Sometimes my lady gets herself into such an
inextricable coil of promises and engagements, all crossing each
other, that in despair she takes to her bed and gives herself out as
ill, and so cuts what she cannot untie. People wonder at her sudden
indisposition, looking as she did only yesterday in the bloom of
health; and they wonder at her radiant reappearance in a day or two
without a trace of even languor upon her. They do not know that her
retirement was simply a version of the famous rope trick, and that,
like the Brothers Davenport, she went into the dark to shake herself
free of the cords with which she had suffered herself to be bound. It
is a short and easy method certainly, but it has rather too much of
the echo of 'Wolf' in it to bear frequent repetition.
In houses of a lower grade, where the lady is her own housekeeper,
the habit of scrambling of course leads to far greater and more
manifest confusion. The servants catch from the mistress the trick of
overstaying time; and punctuality at last comes to mean an elastic
margin, where fixed duties and their appointed times appear
cometically at irregular intervals. The cook is late with dinner; the
coachman begins to put-to a little after the hour he was ordered to
be at the door; but they know that, however late they are, the
chances are ten to one their mistress will not be ready for them, and
that in her heart she will be grateful to them for the shelter their
own unpunctuality affords her. This being so, they take their time
and dawdle at their pleasure; thus adding to the pressure which
always comes at the end of the scrambler's day, when everything is
thrown into a chaotic mass and nothing comes out straight or
complete.
Did any one ever know a scrambling woman ready at the moment in
her own house? That she should be punctual to any appointment
out of her house is, of course, not to be thought of; but she makes
an awkward thing of it sometimes at home. Her guests are often all
assembled, and the dinner hour has struck, before she has torn off
one gown and dragged on another. What she cannot tie she pins;
and her pins are many and demonstrative. She wisps up her hair, not
having left herself time to braid it; and the consequence is that
before she has been half an hour in the room ends and tails are sure
to stray playfully from their fastenings and come tumbling about her
ears. Her jewels are mismatched, her colours ill-assorted, her belt is
awry, her bouquet falling to pieces. She rushes into the drawing-
room in her morning slippers, smiling and good-tempered, with a
patch-work look about her—something forgotten in her attire that
makes her whole appearance shaky and unfinished—fastening her
last button or clasping on her first bracelet. She is full of regrets and
excuses delivered in her joyous, buoyant manner, or in a voice so
winning, an accent so coaxing, that you cannot be annoyed. Besides,
you leave the annoyance to her husband, who is sure to have in
reserve a pickle quite sufficiently strong for the inevitable rod, as the
poor scrambler knows too well. All you can do is to accept her
apologies with a good grace, and to carry away with you a vivid
recollection of an awkward half-hour, a spoilt dinner, and a
scrambling hostess all abroad and out of time, sweeping through the
room very heated, very good-tempered, only half-dressed and
chronically out of breath.
Scramblers can never learn the value of money, neither for
themselves nor for others. They are famous for borrowing small
sums which they forget to return; but, to do them justice, they are
just as willing to lend what they never dream of asking for again.
Long ago they caught hold of the fact that money is only a
circulating medium, and they have added an extra speed to the
circulation at which slower folk stand aghast. To be sure, the
practical results of their theory are not very satisfactory, and the
confusion between the possessive pronouns which distinguishes
their financial catechism is apt to lead to unpleasant issues.
Scrambling women are especially notorious for the way in which
they set themselves afloat without sufficient means to carry them
on; finding themselves stranded in mid-career because they have
made no calculations and have forgotten the rule of subtraction.
They find themselves at a small Italian town, say, where the virtues
of the British banking system are unknown, and where their letters
of credit and circular notes are not worth more than the value of the
paper they are written on. More than one British matron of
respectable condition and weak arithmetic has found herself in such
a plight as this, with her black-eyed landlord perfectly civil and well-
bred, but as firm as a rock in his resolution that the Signora shall not
depart out of his custody till his little account is paid—a plight out of
which she has to scramble the best way she can, with the loss
perhaps of a little dignity and of more repute—at least in the locality
where her solid scudi gave out and her precious paper could not be
cashed. This is the same woman who offers an omnibus conductor a
sovereign for a three-penny fare; who gives the village grocer a ten-
pound note for a shilling's-worth of sugar; and who, when she
comes up to London for a day's shopping, and has got her last
parcel made up and ready to be put into her cab, finds she has not
left herself half enough money to pay for it—with a shopman whose
faith in human nature is by no means lively, and who only last week
was bitten by a lady swindler of undeniable manners and
appearance, and not very unlike herself. She has been known too, to
go into a confectioner's and, after having made an excellent
luncheon, to find to her dismay that she has left her purse in the
pocket of her other dress at home, and that she has not six-pence
about her. In fact there is not an equivocal position in which
forgetfulness, want of method, want of foresight, and all the other
characteristics which make up scrambling in the concrete, can place
her, in which she has not been at some time or other. But no
experience teaches her; the scrambler she was born, the scrambler
she will die, and to the last will tumble through her life, all her ends
flying and deprecating excuses on her lips.
Scramblers are notoriously great for making promises, and as
notorious for not performing what they promise. Kindhearted as they
are in general, and willing to do their friends a service—going out of
their way indeed to proffer kindnesses quite beyond your
expectations and the range of their duties towards you, and always
undertaking works of supererogation; which works in fact lead to
more than half their normal scramble—they forget the next hour the
promise on which you have based your dearest hopes. Or, if they do
not forget it, they find it is crowded out of time by a multitude of
engagements and prior promises, of all of which they were
innocently oblivious when they offered to do your business so
frankly, and swore so confidently they would set about it now at
once and get it out of hand without delay. The oath and the offer
which you took to be as sure as the best chain-cable, you will find
on trial to be only a rope of sand that could not bind so much as a
bunch of tow together, still less hold the anchor of a life; and many a
heart, sick with hope deferred and wrung with the disappointment
which might have been so easily prevented, has been half broken
before now from the anguish that has followed on the failure of the
kindhearted scrambler to perform the promise voluntarily made, and
the service earnestly pressed on a reluctant acceptor.
This is the tragic side of the scrambler's career, the shadow thrown
by almost every one of the class. For all the minor delinquencies of
hurry and unpunctuality in social affairs it is not difficult to find full
and ample forgiveness; but when it comes to untrustworthiness in
graver matters, then the scrambler becomes a scourge instead of
only an inconvenience. The only safe way of dealing with the class is
to take them when we can get hold of them, and to accept them for
what they are worth; but not to rely on them, and not to attempt
any mortising of our own affairs with their promises. They are the
froth and foam of society, pretty and pleasant enough in the sunlight
as they splash and splutter about the rocks; but they are not the
deep waters which bear the burden of our ships and by which the
life of the world is maintained.
Database Systems Design Implementation And Management 13th Edition Coronel Solutions Manual
FLATTERY.
Nothing is so delightful as flattery. To hear and believe pleasant
fictions about oneself is a temptation too seductive for weak mortals
to resist, as the typical legends of all mythologies and the private
histories of most individuals show; in consequence of which, home
truths, to one used to ideal portraiture, come like draughts of 'bitter
cup' to the dram-drinker. And flattery is dram-drinking; and yet not
quite without good uses to balance its undeniable evil, if it be only
exaggeration and not wholly falsehood; that is, if it assumes as a
matter of course the presence of virtues potential to your character
but not always active, and praises you for what you might be if you
chose to live up to your best. Many a weak brother and weaker
sister, and all children, can be heartened into goodness by a little
dash of judicious praise or flattery where ponderous exhortation and
grave reproof would fail; just as a heavily-laden horse can be coaxed
up-hill when the whip and spur would lead to untimely jibbing. If, on
the contrary, the flattery is of a kind that makes you believe yourself
an exceptionally fine fellow when you are only 'mean trash'—a king
of men when you are nothing better nor nobler than a moral nigger
—making you satisfied with yourself when at your worst—then it is
an unmitigated evil; for it then becomes dram-drinking of a very
poisonous kind, which sooner or later does for your soul what
unlimited blue ruin does for your body. But this is what we generally
mean when we speak of flattery; and this is the kind which has such
a deservedly bad name from moralists of all ages.
The flatteries of men to women, and those of women to men, are
very different in kind and direction. Men flatter women for what they
are—for their beauty, their grace, their sweetness, their
charmingness in general; while a woman will flatter a man for what
he does—for his speech in the House last night, of which she
understands little; for his book, of which she understands less; or for
his pleading, of which she understands nothing at all. Not that this
signifies much on either side. The most unintellectual little woman in
the world has brains enough to look up in your face sweetly, and
breathe out something that sounds like 'beautiful—charming—so
clever,' vaguely sketching the outline of a hymn of praise to which
your own vanity supplies the versicles. For you must have an
exceptionally strong head if you can rate the sketch at its real value
and see for yourself how utterly meaningless it is.
You may be the most mystical poet of the day, suggesting to your
acutest readers grave doubts as to your own power of
comprehending yourself; or you may be the most subtle
metaphysician, to follow whom in your labyrinth of reasoning
requires perhaps the rarest order of brains to be met with; but you
will nevertheless believe any narrow-browed, small-headed woman
who tells you in a low sweet voice, with a gentle uplifting of her eyes
and a suggestive curve of her lip, that she has found you both
intelligible and charming, and that she quite agrees with you and
shares your every sentiment. If she further tells you that all her life
long she has thought in exactly the same way but was wholly unable
to express herself, and that you have now supplied her want and
translated into words her vague ideas, and if she says this with a
reverential kind of effusiveness, you are done for, so far as your
critical power goes; and should some candid friend, whom she has
not flattered, tell you with brutal frankness that your bewitching little
flatterer has neither the brains nor the education to understand you,
you will set him down as a slanderer, spiteful and malignant, and call
his candour envy because he has not been so lucky as yourself.
The most subtle form of flattery is that which asks your advice with
the pretence of needing it—your advice, particularly—yours above
that of all other persons, as the wisest, best, most useful to be
obtained. This too is a form that belongs rather to women in their
relations with men than the converse; though sometimes men will
pretend to want a woman's advice about their love affairs, and will
perhaps make-believe to be guided by it. Not unfrequently, however,
asking one woman's opinion and advice about another is a masked
manner of love-making on its own account; though sometimes it
may be done for flattery only, when there are reasons. Of course not
all advice-asking is flattery; but when intended only to please and
not meant to be genuine, it is perhaps one of the most potent
instruments of the art to be met with.
But if seeking advice be the most subtle form of flattery, the most
intoxicating is that which pretends to moral elevation or reform by
your influence. The reformation of a rake is a work which no woman
alive could be found to resist if the rake offered it to her as his last
chance of salvation; and to lead a pretty sinner back to the ways of
picturesque virtue by his own influence only is a temptation to self-
reliance which no man could refuse—a flattery which not Diogenes
nor Zeno himself could see through. The pretensions of any one else
would be laughed at cruelly enough; but this is one of the things
where personal experience and critical judgment never go in harness
together—one of the manifestations of flattery which would
overcome the calmest and bewilder the wisest.
Priests of all denominations are especially open to this kind of
flattery; not only from pretty sinners who have gone openly out of
the right line, but from quite comely and respectable maids and
matrons who have lived blamelessly so far as the broad moral
distinctions go, yet who have not lived the Awakened Life until
roused thereunto by this peculiarly favoured minister. It is a
tremendous trial of a man's discernment when such flattery is
offered to him. How much of this pretended awakening is real? How
much of this sudden spiritual insight is true, and not a mere
phrasing, artfully adopted for pleasantness only? These are the
cases where we most want that famous spear of Ithuriel to help us
to a right estimate, for they are beyond the power of any ordinary
man to determine.
But if priests are subject to these delusions of flattery on the one
hand, they know how to practise them on the other. Take away the
flattery which, mingled with occasional rebuke, forms the great
ministerial spur, and both Revivalism and Ritualism would flag like
flowers without 'the gentle dews.' Scolded for their faults in dress,
for their vanity, extravagance and other feminine vices, are not
women also flattered as the favourites of heaven and of the Church?
Are they not told that they are the lilies of the ecclesiastical garden?
the divinely appointed missionaries for the preservation of virtue and
godly truth in the world? without whom the coarser race of men
would be given over to inconceivable spiritual evil, to infidelity and
all immorality. We may be very sure of this, that if humanity, and
especially feminine humanity, were not flattered as well as
chastened, clerical influence would not last for a day.
There is one kind of flattery which is common to both men and
women, and that is the expressed preference of sex. Thus, when
men want to flatter women, they say how infinitely they prefer their
society to that of their own sex; and women will say the same to
men. Or, if they do not say it, they will act it. See a set of women
congregated together without the light of a manly countenance
among them. They may talk to each other certainly; and one or two
will sit away together and discuss their private affairs with
animation; but the great mass of them are only half vitalized while
waiting the advent of the men to rouse them into life and the desire
to please. No man who goes up first from the dinner-table, and
earlier than he was expected, can fail to see the change which
comes over those wearied, limp, indifferent-looking faces and figures
so soon as he enters the room. He is like the prince whose kiss woke
up the Sleeping Beauty and all her court; and can any one say that
this is not flattery of the most delightful kind? To be the Pygmalion
even for a moment, and for the weakest order of soul-giving, is
about the greatest pleasure that a man can know, if he be
susceptible to the finer kinds of flattery.
Some women indeed, not only show their preference for men, but
openly confess it, and confess at the same time to a lofty contempt
or abhorrence for the society of women. These are generally women
who are, or have been, beauties; or who have literary and
intellectual pretensions; or who despise babies and contemn
housekeeping, and profess themselves unable to talk to other
women because of their narrowness and stupidity. But for the most
part they are women who, by their beauty or their position, have
been used to receive extra attention from men; and thus their
preference is not flattery so much as exigence. Women who have
been in India, or wherever else they are in the minority in society,
are of this kind; and nothing is more amazing to them when they
first come home than the attentions which a certain style of
Englishwoman pays to men, instead of demanding and receiving
attentions from them.
There are also those sweet, humble, caressing women who flatter
you with every word and look, but whose flattery is nothing but a
pretty dress put on for show and taken off when the show is done
with. Anything serves for an occasion with these people. Why, the
way in which certain unmarried women will caress a child before you
is an implied flattery; and they know it. If only they would be careful
to carry these pretty ante-nuptial ways into the home where nothing
is to be gained by them but a humdrum husband's happiness! But
too often the woman whose whole attitude was one of flattering
devotion before her end was gained, gives up every shred of that
which she had in such profusion, when she has attained her object,
and lets the home go bare of that which was so beautiful and
seductive in the ball-room and the flirting corner.
Some men however, want more home flattery to keep them tolerably
happy and up to the mark than any woman with a soul to be saved
by truth can give. Poets and artists are of this kind—men who
literally live on praise, without which they droop and can do nothing.
With them it is absolutely necessary that the people with whom they
are associated should be of appreciative and sympathetic natures;
but the burden comes heavy when they want, as they generally do,
so much more than this. For, in truth, they want flattery in excess of
sympathy; and if they do not get it they hold themselves as the
victims of an unkind fate, and fill the world with the echo of their
woes. This is nine-tenths of the cause why great geniuses are so
often unhappy in married life. They demand more incessant flattery
than can be kept up by one woman, unless she has not only an
exceptional power of love but also an exceptional power of self-
suppression. They think that by virtue of their genius they are
entitled to a Benjamin's mess of devotion double that given to other
men; and when they get only Judah's share, they cry out that they
are ill-used, and make the world think them ill-used as well.
But though a little home flattery helps the home life immeasurably,
and greases the creaking domestic wheels more than anything else
can, a great deal is just the most pernicious thing that can be
offered. The belief prevalent in some families that all the very small
and commonplace members thereof are the world's wonders and
greater than any one else—that no one is so clever as Harry, no one
so pretty as Julia, that Amy's red hair is of a more brilliant gold than
can be found elsewhere, and Edward's mathematical abilities about
equal to Newton's—this belief, nourished and acted on, is sure to
turn out an insufferable collection of prigs and self-conceited
damsels who have to be brought down innumerable pegs before
they find their own level. But we often see this; especially in country
places where there is not much society to give a standard for
comparative measurement; and we know that those fond parents
and doting relations are blindly and diligently sowing seeds of
bitterness for a future harvest of sorrow for their darlings. These
young people must be made to suffer if they are to be of any good
whatever in the world; and finding their level, after the exalted
position which they have been supposed to fill so long, and being
pelted with the unsavoury missiles of truth in exchange for all the
incense of flattery to which they have been used, will be suffering
enough. But it has to be gone through; this being one of the
penalties to which the unwisdom of love so often subjects its
objects.
The flattery met with in society is not often very harmful save to
coarse or specially simple natures. You must be either one or the
other to be able to believe it. Lady Morgan was perhaps the most
unblushing and excessive of the tribe of social flatterers; but that
was her engine, the ladder by which she did a good part of her
climbing. We must not confound with this kind of flattery the
impulsive expression of praise or love which certain outspoken
people indulge in to the last. You may as well try to dam up Niagara
as to make some folks reticent of their thoughts and feelings. And
when one of this kind sees anything that he or she likes, the praise
has to come out, with superlatives if the creature be prone to
exaggeration. But this is not flattery; it is merely a certain childlike
expansiveness which lasts with some into quite old age.
Unfortunately, very few understand this childlike expansiveness
when they see it. Hence it subjects its possessor to
misrepresentation and unfriendly jibes, so soon as his or her back is
turned, and the explosion of exaggerated but perfectly sincere praise
is discussed critically by the uninterested part of the audience.
LA FEMME PASSÉE.
Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful
according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old
and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of
their personal value, so much of their natural final cause, that when
these are gone many feel as if their whole career were at an end,
and as if nothing were left to them now that they are no longer
young enough to be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be
admired as mature sirens are admired. For women of a certain
position have so little wholesome occupation, and so little ambition
for anything save indeed that miserable thing called 'getting on in
society,' that they cannot change their way of life with advancing
years. Hence they do not attempt to find interest in things outside
themselves, and independent of the personal attractiveness which in
youth constituted their whole pleasure of existence.
This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who have
staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more
account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain
young is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.
With the ideal woman of middle age—that pleasant She with her
calm face and soft manner, who unites the charms of both epochs,
retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider
sympathies of experience—with her there has been no such struggle
to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains beautiful
to the last—far more beautiful than all the pastes and washes in
Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these
latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an
atmosphere of her own—an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth
and love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for
the time. All children and all young persons love her, because she
understands and loves them. For she is essentially a mother—that is,
a woman who can forget herself; who can give without asking to
receive; and who, without losing any of the individualism which
belongs to self-respect, can yet live for and in the lives of others,
and find her best joy in the well-being of those about her. There is
no exaggerated sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfilment of
woman's highest duty—the expression of that grand maternal
instinct which need not necessarily include the fact of personal
maternity, but which, with all women worthy of the name, must find
utterance in some line of unselfish action.
The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she
has lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal
duties with cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her
nursery to the care of a hired servant who is expected to do for so
many pounds a year things which the tremendous instinct of a
mother's love could not find strength to do. When she had children,
she attended to them in great part herself, and learnt all about their
tempers, their maladies, and the best methods of management. As
they grew up she was still the best friend they had—the Providence
of their young lives who gave them both care and justice, both love
and guidance. Such a manner of life has forced her to forget herself.
When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she had no heart and no time
to think of her own appearance, and whether this dressing-gown
was more becoming than that: and what did the doctor think of her
with her hair pushed back from her face?—and what a fright she
must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of
watching! The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains
faded away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not
the finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought
compared to the all-absorbing question of whether her child slept
after his draught and whether he ate his food with better appetite.
And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well as
unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she
comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted
by paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste,
but decent in form and consistent in tone with her age, it is often
remarked that she looks more like the sister than the mother of her
girls. This is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not
therefore put herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very
keystone of beauty. Her hair is thickly streaked with white; the girlish
firmness and transparency of her skin have gone; the pearly
clearness of her eye is clouded; the slender grace of line is lost—but
for all that she is beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she
has lost in outside material charm—in that mere beauté du diable of
youth—she has gained in character and expression; and by not
attempting to simulate the attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what
nature gave her—the attractiveness of middle age. And as every
epoch has its own beauty—if women would but learn that truth—she
is as beautiful now as a matron of fifty, because in harmony with her
years, as she was when a maiden of sixteen.
This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at times in
society—the woman whom all men respect; whom all women envy,
and wonder how she does it; and whom all the young adore, and
wish they had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all
lies in truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.
Standing far apart from this sweet and wholesome idealization is la
femme passée of to-day—the reality as we meet with it at balls and
fêtes and afternoon At Homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after
pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into
the world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion; her thinning
hair dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow
than hair; her flaccid cheeks ruddled; her throat whitened; her bust
displayed with unflinching generosity—as if beauty is to be measured
by cubic inches; her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give
the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished whites; perhaps the
pupils dilated by belladonna; perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for
the moment given by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has
a store in her carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no
kindly drapery of lace nor of gauze to conceal the breadth of her
robust maturity, to soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness—
there she stands, the wretched creature who will not consent to
grow old, and who still affects to be a fresh coquettish girl when she
is nothing but la femme passée—la femme passée et ridicule into the
bargain.
There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is
but a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her
abundant experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may
be, she flirts and makes love as if an honourable issue were as open
to her as to her young daughter; or as if she did not know to what
end flirting and making love lead in all ages. If we watch the career
of such a woman, we see how, by slow but very sure degrees, she is
obliged to lower the standard of her adorers, and to take up at last
with men of inferior social position, who are content to buy her
patronage by their devotion. To the best men of her own class she
can give nothing that they value; so she barters with snobs, who go
into the transaction with their eyes open, and take the whole affair
as a matter of exchange, and quid pro quo rigidly exacted. Or she
does really dazzle some very young and low-born man who is weak
as well as ambitious, and who thinks the fugitive regard of a middle-
aged woman of high rank something to be proud of and boasted
about. That she is as old as his own mother—at this moment selling
tapes behind a village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country
farm—tells nothing against the association with him; and the woman
who began her career of flirtation with the son of a duke ends it with
the son of a shopkeeper, having between these two terms spanned
all the several degrees of degradation which lie between giving and
buying. She cannot help herself; for it is part of the insignia of her
artificial youth to have the reputation of a love-affair, or the pretence
of one, even if the reality be a mere delusion. When such a woman
as this is one of the matrons, and consequently one of the leaders of
society, what can we expect from the girls? What worse example
could be given to the young? When we see her with her own
daughters we feel instinctively that she is the most disastrous
adviser they could have; and when in the company of girls or young
married women not belonging to her, we doubt whether we ought
not to warn their natural guardians against allowing such
association, for all that her standing in society is undeniable, and not
a door is shut against her.
What good in life does this kind of woman do? All her time is taken
up, first in trying to make herself look twenty or thirty years younger
than she is, and then in trying to make others believe the same. She
has neither thought nor energy to spare from this, to her, far more
important work than is feeding the hungry or nursing the sick,
rescuing the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final cause of her
existence seems to be the impetus she has given to a certain branch
of trade manufacture—unless we add to this, the corruption of
society. For whom, but for her, are the 'little secrets' which are
continually being advertised as woman's social salvation—regardless
of grammar? The 'eaux noire, brun, et châtain, which dyes the hair
any shade in one minute;' the 'kohl for the eyelids;' the 'blanc de
perle,' and 'rouge de Lubin'—which does not wash off; the 'bleu pour
les veines;' the 'rouge of eight shades,' and 'the sympathetic blush,'
which are cynically offered for the use and adoption of our mothers
and daughters, find their chief patroness in the femme passée who
makes herself up—the middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic
struggle against time, and obstinately refusing to grow old in spite of
all that nature may say or do. Bad as the Girl of the Period is, this
horrible travesty of her vices in the modern matron is even worse.
Indeed, were it not for her, the girls would never have gone to such
lengths as those to which they have gone; for elder women naturally
have immense influence over younger ones, and if mothers were
resolutely to set their faces against the follies of the day, daughters
would and must give in. As it is, some go even ahead of the young,
and, by example on the one hand and rivalry on the other, sow the
curse of corruption broadcast where they were meant to have only a
pure influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for those who
still remain faithful—women who regard themselves as the trustees
for humanity and virtue—the world would go to ruin forthwith; but
so long as the five righteous are left we have hope and a certain
amount of security for the future, when the present disgraceful
madness of society shall have passed away.
SPOILT WOMEN.
Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if subjected
to unwholesome conditions. Sometimes the spoiling comes from
over-harshness, sometimes from over-indulgence; what we are
speaking of to-day is the latter condition—the spoiling which comes
from being petted and given way to and indulged, till they think
themselves better than everybody else, and living under laws made
specially for them. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for
the most part there is a tougher fibre in them which resists the
flabby influences of flattery and exaggerated attention better than
can the morale of the weaker sex; besides, even arbitrary men meet
with opposition in certain directions, and the most self-contented
social autocrat knows that his adherents criticize though they dare
not oppose.
A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so
that he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way and able to
conquer any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain
high-handed activity of will about him that does not interfere with
his duties in life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant
as a woman is—as if he alone of all mankind ought to be exempt
from misfortunes and annoyances; as if his friends must never die,
his youth never fade, his circumstances run always smooth,
protected by the care of others from all untoward hitch; as if time
and tide, which wait for no one else, are bound to him as humble
servants dutifully observant of his wishes. The useful art of finding
his level, which he learnt at school and in his youth generally, keeps
him from any very weak manifestation of being spoilt; save indeed,
when he has been spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an
adoring wife and a large circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, to
all of whom his smallest wishes are religious obligations and his
faintest virtues godly graces, and who vie with each other which of
them shall wait upon him most servilely, flatter him most
outrageously, coax and coddle him most entirely, and so do him the
largest amount of spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly
for the worth and work of masculine life. A man subjected to this
insidious injury is simply ruined so far as any real manliness of
nature goes. He is made into that sickening creature, 'a sweet
being,' as the women call him—a woman's man with æsthetic tastes
and a turn for poetry; full of highflown sentiment and morbid
sympathies; a man almost as much woman as man, who has no
backbone of useful ambition in him, but who puts his whole life into
love, and who becomes at last emphatically not worth his salt.
Bad as it is for men of the world to be kowtowed to by men, it is not
so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry which
sometimes goes on when one man is the centre of a large family of
women, and the only object upon which the natural feminine instinct
can expend itself. No greater damage can be done to a man than is
done by this kind of domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too
pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far master of
himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, the sweet and
penetrating poison, of woman's tender flattery and loving
submission. To a certain extent he holds it so entirely the right thing,
because it is natural and instinctive, that it is difficult to draw the line
and map out exactly the division between right and wrong,
pleasantness and harmfulness, and where loving submission ends
and debasing slavishness begins.
Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause: over-attention
from men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters,
with indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up to ruining
their young charges with the utmost despatch possible; but this is
comparatively a rare form of the disease, and one which a little
wholesome matrimonial discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom
that a petted daughter becomes a spoilt wife—human affairs having
that marvellous power of equation, that inevitable tendency to
readjust the balance, which prevents the continuance of a like
excess under different forms. Besides, a spoilt daughter generally
makes such a supremely unpleasant wife that the husband has no
inducement to continue the mistake, and therefore either lowers her
tone by a judicious exhibition of snubbing, or, if she be aggressive as
well as unpleasant, leaves her to fight with her shadows in the best
way she can, glad for his own part to escape the strife she will not
forego.
The spoilt woman is impatient of anything like rivalry. She never has
a female friend—certainly not one of her own degree, and not one at
all in the true sense of the word. Friendship presupposes equality;
and a spoilt woman knows no equality. She has been so long
accustomed to consider herself as lady-paramount that she cannot
understand it if any one steps in to share her honours and divide her
throne. To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her
charming, and to pay her the attention due to a charming woman, is
to insult our spoilt darling, and to slight her past forgiveness. If there
is only one good thing, it must be given to her—the first seat, the
softest cushion, the most protected situation; and she looks for the
best of all things as if naturally consecrated from her birth to the
sunshine of life, and as if the 'cold shade' which may do for others
were by no means the portion allotted to her.
It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman understand the
grace or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she may
sometimes be found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience
which sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only
sometimes. The spoilt woman par excellence understands only her
own value, only her own merits and the absolutism of her own
requirements; and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of
virtues belonging to unselfishness, are as much unknown to her as is
the Decalogue in the original, or the squaring of the circle. The spoilt
woman, as the wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of
sickly children, is a pitiable spectacle. If obliged to sacrifice her usual
luxuries, to make an old gown serve when a new one is desired, to
sit up all night watching by the sick-bed, to witness the painful
details of illness, perhaps of death, to meet hardship face to face
and to bend her back to the burden of sorrow, she is at the first
absolutely lost. Not the thing to be done, but her own discomfort in
doing it, is the one master idea—not others' needs, but her own pain
in supplying them, is the great grief of the moment. Many are the
hard lessons set us by life and fate, but the hardest of all is that
given to the spoilt woman when she is made to think for others
rather than for herself, and is forced by the exigencies of
circumstances to sacrifice her own ease for the greater necessities of
her kind.
All that large part of the true woman's nature which expresses itself
in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be
waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one she loves.
She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room
to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and
put it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him
get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her
longest walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the
drawing-room. It is not that she cannot do these small offices for
herself, but that she likes the feeling of being waited on; and it is not
for love, and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of
the beloved, but it is for the vanity of being a little somebody for the
moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the
procedure, that she claims his attention. She would not return that
attention. Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords hand
and foot, and who place their highest honour in their lowliest
service, the spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of the
natural grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for gratitude.
This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the demi-monde of the
higher class, and among women who are of the demi-monde by
nature. The respect they cannot command by their virtues they
demand in the simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are
more tenacious of the outward forms of deference than those who
have lost their claim to the vital reality. It is very striking to see the
difference between the women of this type, the petites maîtresses
who require the utmost attention and almost servility from man, and
the noble dignity of service which the pure woman can afford to give
—which she finds indeed, that it belongs to the very purity and
nobleness of her womanhood to give. It is the old story of the ill-
assured position which is afraid of its own weakness, and the
security which can afford to descend—the rule holding good for
other things besides mere social place.
Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the changeableness
and excitability of her temper. All suavity and gentleness and
delightful gaiety and perfect manners when everything goes right,
she startles you by her outburst of petulance when the first cross
comes. If no man is a hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a
heroine to her maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of
the drawing-room, upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go
through spiritual exercises to which walking among burning
ploughshares is easy-going. A length of lace unstarched, a ribbon
unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that crumples one of the
myriad rose-leaves on which she lies, and the spoilt woman raves as
much as if each particular leaf had become suddenly a bunch of
thorns. If a dove were to be transformed to a hawk the change
would not be more complete, more startling, than that which occurs
when the spoilt woman of well-bred company manners puts off her
mask to her maid, and shows her temper over trifles. Whoever else
may suffer the grievances of life, she cannot understand that she
also must be at times one of the sufferers with the rest; and if by
chance the bad moment comes, the person accompanying it has a
hard time of it.
There are spoilt women also who have their peculiar exercises in
thought and opinion, and who cannot suffer that any one should
think differently from themselves, or find those things sacred which
to them are accursed. They will hear nothing but what is in harmony
with themselves; and they take it as a personal insult when men or
women attempt to reason with them, or even hold their own without
flinching. This kind is to be found specially among the more
intellectual of a family or a circle—women who are pronounced
clever by their friends, and who have been so long accustomed to
think themselves clever that they have become spoilt mentally as
others are personally, and fancy that minds and thoughts must
follow in their direction, just as eyes and hands must follow and
attend their sisters. The spoilt woman of the mental kind is a horrid
nuisance generally. She is greatly given to large discourse. But
discourse of a kind that leans all to one side, and that denies the
right of any one to criticize, doubt, or contradict, is an intellectual
Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not pleasant to live.
DOVECOTS.
Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are not still left to
keep the sources of society sweet and wholesome. When corruption
has gone through the whole mass and all classes are bad alike,
everything comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of
national life; but while some are left pure and unspotted, we are not
quite undone, and we may reasonably hope for better days in the
future. In the midst of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her
slang and her boldness—of the fashionable woman, with her denial
of duty and her madness for pleasure—we come every now and then
upon a group of good girls of the real old English type; the faithful
few growing up silently among us, but none the less valuable
because they are silent and make no public display; doves who are
content with life as they have it in the dovecot, and have no desire
to be either eagles dwelling on romantic heights, or peacocks
displaying their pride in sunny courts. We find these faithful few in
town and country alike; but they are rifest in the country, where
there is less temptation to go wrong than there is in the large towns,
and where life is simpler and the moral tone undeniably higher. The
leading feature of these girls is their love of home and of their own
family, and their power of making occupation and happiness out of
apparently meagre materials. If they are the elders, they find
amusement and interest in their little brothers and sisters, whom
they consider immensely funny and to whom they are as much girl-
mothers as sisters; if they are the youngers, they idolize their baby
nephews and nieces. For there is always a baby going on
somewhere about these houses—babies being the great excitement
of home-life, and the antiseptic element among women which keeps
everything else pure. They are passionately attached to papa and
mamma, whom they think the very king and queen of humanity, yet
whom they do not call by even endearing slang names. It has never
occurred to them to criticize them as ordinary mortals; and as they
have not been in the way of learning the prevailing accent of
disrespect, they have not shaken off that almost religious veneration
for their parents which all young people naturally feel, if they have
been well brought up and are not corrupted.
The yoke in most middle-class country-houses is one fitting very
loosely round all necks; and as they have all the freedom they desire
or could use, the girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are
content to live in peace under such restraints as they have. They
adore their elder brothers who are from home just beginning the
great battle of life for themselves, and confidently believe them to
be the finest fellows going, and the future great men of the day if
only they care to put out those splendid talents of theirs, and take
the trouble of plucking the prizes within their reach. They may have
a slight reservation perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom
they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But they keep their
mental architecture a profound secret from every one, and do not
suffer it to grow into too solid a structure unless it has some surer
foundation than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving, they
are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy and natural and
quietly busy for unwholesome dreams. If one of them marries, they
all unite in loving the man who comes in among them. He is adopted
as one of themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing sisters who
pet him as their brother—with just that subtle little difference in their
petting, in so much as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so
has the charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of
naughtiness. But this kind of thing is about the most dangerous to a
man's moral nature that can befall him. Though pretty to see and
undeniably pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent in
every way, still, nothing enervates him so much as this idolatrous
submission of a large family of women. In a widow's house, where
there are many daughters and no sons, and where the man who
marries one marries the whole family and is worshipped accordingly,
the danger is of course increased tenfold; but if there are brothers
and a father, the sister's husband, though affectionately cooed over,
is not made quite such a fuss with, and the association is all the less
hurtful in consequence.
These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though it is a quiet one,
and without any spasmodic events or tremendous cataclysms. They
go a great deal among the village poor, and they teach at the
Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and clothing-clubs
and the like, and learn to get interested in their humbler friends,
who after all are Christian sisters. They read their romances in real
life instead of in three-volume novels, and study human nature as it
is—in the rough certainly, but perhaps in more genuine form than if
they learnt it only in what is called society. Then they have their
pleasures, though they are of an unexciting kind and what fast girls
would call awfully slow. They have their horses and their croquet
parties, their lawn tennis and their archery meetings; they have
batches of new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's—and they
know the value of both; they go out to tea, and sometimes to
dinner, in the neighbourhood; and they enjoy the rare county balls
with a zest unknown to London girls who are out every night in the
week. They have their village flower-shows, which the great families
patronize in a free-and-easy kind of way, and which give occupation
for weeks before and subject for talk for weeks after; their school
feasts, where the pet parson of the district comes out with his best
anecdotes, and makes mild jokes at a long distance from Sydney
Smith; their periodical missionary meetings, where they have great
guns from London, and where they hear unctuous stories about the
saintliness of converted cannibals, and are required to believe in the
power of change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle; they
have their friends to stay with them—school-girl friends—with whom
they exchange deep confidences, and go back over the old days—so
old to their youth!—their brothers come down in the summer, and
their brothers' friends come with them, and do a little spooning in
the shrubbery. But there is more spooning done at picnics than
anywhere else; and more offers are made there under the shadow
of the old ruin, or in the quiet leafy nook by the river side, than at
any other gathering time of the country. And as we are all to a
certain extent what we are made by our environment, the doves
take to these pleasures quite kindly and gratefully, as being the only
ones known to them, and enjoy themselves in a simplicity of
circumstances which would give no pleasure at all to girls
accustomed to more highly-spiced entertainments.
Doves know very little of evil. They are not in the way of learning it;
and they do not care to learn it. The few villagers who are supposed
to lead ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and carefully avoided
without being critically studied. When the railway is to be carried
past their quiet nest, there is an immense excitement as the report
goes that a knot of strange men have been seen scattering
themselves over the fields with their little white flags and
theodolites, their measuring lines and levels. But when the army of
navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to consternation,
and a general sense of evil to come advancing ruthlessly towards
them. The clergy of the district organize special services, and the
scared doves keep religiously away from the place where the navvies
are hutted. They think them little better than the savages about
whom the Deputation tell them once or twice a year; and they
create almost as much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They
represent the lawless forces of the world and the unknown sins of
strong men; and the wildest story about them is not too wild to be
believed. The railway altogether is a great offence to the
neighbourhood, and the line is assumed to destroy the whole scenic
beauty of the place. There are lamentations over the cockneys it will
bring down; over the high prices it will create, the immorality it will
cause. Only the sons who are out in the world and have learnt how
life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate keeping pace with the
times; and a few of the stronger minded of the sisters listen to them
with a timid admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think
there may be two sides to the question after all. When the dashing
captain and his fast wife suddenly appear in the village—as often
happens in these remote districts—the doves are in a state of great
moral tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs. Highflyer's costume
and complexion, and think her manners odd and doubtful; her slang
shocks them; and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so loudly
and laughing so shrilly with that horrid-looking man in a green
cutaway, they feel as fluttered as their namesakes when a hawk is
hovering over the farmyard. The dashing captain, who does not use
a prayer-book at church, who stares at all the girls so rudely, and
who has even been seen to wink at some of the prettier cottage
girls, and his handsome wife with her equivocal complexion and
pronounced fashions, who makes eyes at the curate, are never
heartily adopted by the local magnates, though vouched for by some
far-away backer; and the doves always feel them to be strange
bodies among them, and out of their rightful element somehow. If
things go quietly without an explosion, well and good; but if the
truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a London detective, and
the Highflyers are found to be no better than they should be, the
consternation and half-awed wonderment at the existence of so
much effrontery and villany in their atmosphere create an impression
which no time effaces. The first clash of innocence with evil is an
event in the life of the innocent the effect of which nothing ever
destroys.
The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the doves are somewhat
moped; but even then they have the church to decorate, and the
sentiment of Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the
family too, return to the old hearth while they can; and as the great
joy of the dovecot lies in the family union that is kept up, and in the
family love which is so strong, the visits of those who no longer live
at home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as the
physical sunshine. But they do not all assemble. For many of the
doves marry men whose work lies abroad; these quiet country-
houses being the favourite matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists
and Anglo-Indians. So that some are always absent whose healths
are drunk in the traditional punch, while eyes grow moist as the
names are given. Doves are not disinclined to marry men who have
to go abroad, for all the passionate family love common to them.
Travel is a golden dream to them in their still homes; but travel
properly companioned. For even the most adventurous among them
are not independent, as we mean when we speak of independence
in women. They are essentially home-girls, family-girls, doves who
cannot exist without a dovecot, however humble. The family is
everything to them; and they are utterly unfit for the solitude which
so many of our self-supporting women can accept quite resignedly.
Not that they are necessarily useless even as breadwinners. They
could work, if pushed to it; but it must be in a quiet womanly way,
with the mother, the sister, the husband as the helper—with the
home as the place of rest and the refuge. Their whole lines are laid
in love and quietness; not by any means in inaction, but all centred
within the home circle. If they marry, they find the love of their
husband enough for them, and have no desire for other men's
admiration. Their babies are all the world to them, and they do not
think maternity an infliction, as so many of the miserably fashionable
think it. They like the occupation of housekeeping, and feel pride in
their fine linen and clean service, in their well-ordered table and
neatly-balanced accounts. They are kind to their servants, who
generally come from the old home, and whose families they
therefore know; but they keep up a certain dignity and tone of
superiority towards them in the midst of all their kindness, which
very few town-bred mistresses can keep to town-bred maids. They
have always been the aristocracy in their native place; and they
carry through life the ineffaceable stamp which being 'the best'
gives.
Doves are essentially mild and gentle women; not queens of society
even when they are pretty, because not caring for social success and
therefore not laying themselves out for it; for if they please at home
that is all they care for, holding love before admiration, and the
esteem of one higher than the praise of many. If a fault is to be
found with them it is that they have not perhaps quite enough salt
for the general taste, used as it is to such highly-seasoned social
food; but do we really want our women to have so very much
character? Do not our splendid passionate creatures lead madly
wretched lives and make miserably uncomfortable homes? and are
not our glorious heroines better in pictures and in fiction than seated
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  • 5. Chapter 9 Database Design 261 Chapter 9 Database Design Discussion Focus What is the relationship between a database and an information system, and how does this relationship have a bearing on database design? An information system performs three sets of services: • It provides for data collection, storage, and retrieval. • It facilitates the transformation of data into information. • It provides the tools and conditions to manage both data and information. Basically, a database is a fact (data) repository that serves an information system. If the database is designed poorly, one can hardly expect that the data/information transformation will be successful, nor is it reasonable to expect efficient and capable management of data and information. The transformation of data into information is accomplished through application programs. It is impossible to produce good information from poor data; and, no matter how sophisticated the application programs are, it is impossible to use good application programs to overcome the effects of bad database design. In short: Good database design is the foundation of a successful information system. Database design must yield a database that: • Does not fall prey to uncontrolled data duplication, thus preventing data anomalies and the attendant lack of data integrity. • Is efficient in its provision of data access. • Serves the needs of the information system. The last point deserves emphasis: even the best-designed database lacks value if it fails to meet information system objectives. In short, good database designers must pay close attention to the information system requirements. Systems design and database design are usually tightly intertwined and are often performed in parallel. Therefore, database and systems designers must cooperate and coordinate to yield the best possible information system. What is the relationship between the SDLC and the DBLC? The SDLC traces the history (life cycle) of an information system. The DBLC traces the history (life cycle) of a database system. Since we know that the database serves the information system, it is not surprising that the two life cycles conform to the same basic phases. Suggestion: Use Figure 9.8 as the basis for a discussion of the parallel activities.
  • 6. Chapter 9 Database Design 262 What basic database design strategies exist, and how are such strategies executed? Suggestion: Use Figure 9.14 as the basis for this discussion. There are two basic approaches to database design: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down design begins by identifying the different entity types and the definition of each entity's attributes. In other words, top-down design: • starts by defining the required data sets and then • defines the data elements for each of those data sets. Bottom-up design: • first defines the required attributes and then • groups the attributes to form entities. Although the two methodologies tend to be complementary, database designers who deal with small databases with relatively few entities, attributes, and transactions tend to emphasize the bottom-up approach. Database designers who deal with large, complex databases usually find that a primarily top-down design approach is more appropriate. In spite of the frequent arguments concerning the best design approach, perhaps the top-down vs. bottom-up distinction is quite artificial. The text's note is worth repeating: NOTE Even if a generally top-down approach is selected, the normalization process that revises existing table structures is (inevitably) a bottom-up technique. E-R models constitute a top-down process even if the selection of attributes and entities may be described as bottom-up. Since both the E-R model and normalization techniques form the basis for most designs, the top-down vs. bottom-up debate may be based on a distinction without a difference.
  • 7. Chapter 9 Database Design 263 Answers to Review Questions 1. What is an information system? What is its purpose? An information system is a system that • provides the conditions for data collection, storage, and retrieval • facilitates the transformation of data into information • provides management of both data and information. An information system is composed of hardware, software (DBMS and applications), the database(s), procedures, and people. Good decisions are generally based on good information. Ultimately, the purpose of an information system is to facilitate good decision making by making relevant and timely information available to the decision makers. 2. How do systems analysis and systems development fit into a discussion about information systems? Both systems analysis and systems development constitute part of the Systems Development Life Cycle, or SDLC. Systems analysis, phase II of the SDLC, establishes the need for and the extent of an information system by • Establishing end-user requirements. • Evaluating the existing system. • Developing a logical systems design. Systems development, based on the detailed systems design found in phase III of the SDLC, yields the information system. The detailed system specifications are established during the systems design phase, in which the designer completes the design of all required system processes. 3. What does the acronym SDLC mean, and what does an SDLC portray? SDLC is the acronym that is used to label the System Development Life Cycle. The SDLC traces the history of a information system from its inception to its obsolescence. The SDLC is composed of six phases: planning, analysis, detailed system, design, implementation and maintenance. 4. What does the acronym DBLC mean, and what does a DBLC portray? DBLC is the acronym that is used to label the Database Life Cycle. The DBLC traces the history of a database system from its inception to its obsolescence. Since the database constitutes the core of an information system, the DBLC is concurrent to the SDLC. The DBLC is composed of six phases: initial study, design, implementation and loading, testing and evaluation, operation, and maintenance and evolution.
  • 8. Chapter 9 Database Design 264 5. Discuss the distinction between centralized and decentralized conceptual database design. Centralized and decentralized design constitute variations on the bottom-up and top-down approaches we discussed in the third question presented in the discussion focus. Basically, the centralized approach is best suited to relatively small and simple databases that lend themselves well to a bird's-eye view of the entire database. Such databases may be designed by a single person or by a small and informally constituted design team. The company operations and the scope of its problems are sufficiently limited to enable the designer(s) to perform all of the necessary database design tasks: 1. Define the problem(s). 2. Create the conceptual design. 3. Verify the conceptual design with all user views. 4. Define all system processes and data constraints. 5. Assure that the database design will comply with all achievable end user requirements. The centralized design procedure thus yields the design summary shown in Figure Q9.5A. Figure Q9.5A The Centralized Design Procedure Conceptual Model Data Constraints System Processes User Views Conceptual Model Verification D A T A D I C T I O N A R Y
  • 9. Chapter 9 Database Design 265 Note that the centralized design approach requires the completion and validation of a single conceptual design. NOTE Use the text’s Figures 9.15 and 9.16 to contrast the two design approaches, then use Figure 9.6 to show the procedure flows; demonstrate that such procedure flows are independent of the degree of centralization. In contrast, when company operations are spread across multiple operational sites or when the database has multiple entities that are subject to complex relations, the best approach is often based on the decentralized design. Typically, a decentralized design requires that the design task be divided into multiple modules, each one of which is assigned to a design team. The design team activities are coordinated by the lead designer, who must aggregate the design teams' efforts. Since each team focuses on modeling a subset of the system, the definition of boundaries and the interrelation between data subsets must be very precise. Each team creates a conceptual data model corresponding to the subset being modeled. Each conceptual model is then verified individually against the user views, processes, and constraints for each of the modules. After the verification process has been completed, all modules are integrated in one conceptual model. Since the data dictionary describes the characteristics of all the objects within the conceptual data model, it plays a vital role in the integration process. Naturally, after the subsets have been aggregated into a larger conceptual model, the lead designer must verify that the combined conceptual model is still able to support all the required transactions. Thus the decentralized design activities may be summarized as shown in Figure Q9.6B.
  • 10. Chapter 9 Database Design 266 Figure Q9.6B The Decentralized Design Procedure D A T A D I C T I O N A R Y Subset A DATA COMPONENT Views, Processes, Constraints Views, Processes, Constraints Views, Processes, Constraints Aggregation Subset B Subset C Verification Conceptual Models FINAL CONCEPTUAL MODEL Keep in mind that the aggregation process requires the lead designer to assemble a single model in which various aggregation problems must be addressed: • synonyms and homonyms. Different departments may know the same object by different names (synonyms), or they may use the same name to address different objects (homonyms.) The object may be an entity, an attribute, or a relationship. • entity and entity subclasses. An entity subset may be viewed as a separate entity by one or more departments. The designer must integrate such subclasses into a higher-level entity. • Conflicting object definitions. Attributes may be recorded as different types (character, numeric), or different domains may be defined for the same attribute. Constraint definitions, too, may vary. The designer must remove such conflicts from the model. 6. What is the minimal data rule in conceptual design? Why is it important? The minimal data rule specifies that all the data defined in the data model are actually required to fit present and expected future data requirements. This rule may be phrased as All that is needed is there, and all that is there is needed.
  • 11. Chapter 9 Database Design 267 7. Discuss the distinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches to database design. There are two basic approaches to database design: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down design begins by identifying the different entity types and the definition of each entity's attributes. In other words, top-down design: • starts by defining the required data sets and then • defines the data elements for each of those data sets. Bottom-up design: • first defines the required attributes and then • groups the attributes to form entities. Although the two methodologies tend to be complementary, database designers who deal with small databases with relatively few entities, attributes, and transactions tend to emphasize the bottom-up approach. Database designers who deal with large, complex databases usually find that a primarily top-down design approach is more appropriate. 8. What are business rules? Why are they important to a database designer? Business rules are narrative descriptions of the business policies, procedures, or principles that are derived from a detailed description of operations. Business rules are particularly valuable to database designers, because they help define: • Entities • Attributes • Relationships (1:1, 1:M, M:N, expressed through connectivities and cardinalities) • Constraints To develop an accurate data model, the database designer must have a thorough and complete understanding of the organization's data requirements. The business rules are very important to the designer because they enable the designer to fully understand how the business works and what role is played by data within company operations. NOTE Do keep in mind that an ERD cannot always include all the applicable business rules. For example, although constraints are often crucial, it is often not possible to model them. For instance, there is no way to model a constraint such as “no pilot may be assigned to flight duties more than ten hours during any 24-hour period.” It is also worth emphasizing that the description of (company) operations must be done in almost excruciating detail and it must be verified and re-verified. An inaccurate description of operations yields inaccurate business rules that lead to database designs that are destined to fail. 9. What is the data dictionary's function in database design?
  • 12. Chapter 9 Database Design 268 A good data dictionary provides a precise description of the characteristics of all the entities and attributes found within the database. The data dictionary thus makes it easier to check for the existence of synonyms and homonyms, to check whether all attributes exist to support required reports, to verify appropriate relationship representations, and so on. The data dictionary's contents are both developed and used during the six DBLC phases: DATABASE INITIAL STUDY The basic data dictionary components are developed as the entities and attributes are defined during this phase. DATABASE DESIGN The data dictionary contents are used to verify the database design components: entities, attributes, and their relationships. The designer also uses the data dictionary to check the database design for homonyms and synonyms and verifies that the entities and attributes will support all required query and report requirements. IMPLEMENTATION AND LOADING The DBMS's data dictionary helps to resolve any remaining attribute definition inconsistencies. TESTING AND EVALUATION If problems develop during this phase, the data dictionary contents may be used to help restructure the basic design components to make sure that they support all required operations. OPERATION If the database design still yields (the almost inevitable) operational glitches, the data dictionary may be used as a quality control device to ensure that operational modifications to the database do not conflict with existing components. MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION As users face inevitable changes in information needs, the database may be modified to support those needs. Perhaps entities, attributes, and relationships must be added, or relationships must be changed. If new database components are fit into the design, their introduction may produce conflict with existing components. The data dictionary turns out to be a very useful tool to check whether a suggested change invites conflicts within the database design and, if so, how such conflicts may be resolved. 10. What steps are required in the development of an ER diagram? (Hint: See Table 9.3.) Table 9.3 is reproduced for your convenience.
  • 13. Chapter 9 Database Design 269 TABLE 9.3 Developing the Conceptual Model, Using ER Diagrams STEP ACTIVITY 1 Identify, analyze, and refine the business rules. 2 Identify the main entities, using the results of Step 1. 3 Define the relationships among the entities, using the results of Steps 1 and 2. 4 Define the attributes, primary keys, and foreign keys for each of the entities. 5 Normalize the entities. (Remember that entities are implemented as tables in an RDBMS.) 6 Complete the initial ER diagram. 7 Validate the ER model against the user’s information and processing requirements. 8 Modify the ER diagram, using the results of Step 7. Point out that some of the steps listed in Table 9.3 take place concurrently. And some, such as the normalization process, can generate a demand for additional entities and/or attributes, thereby causing the designer to revise the ER model. For example, while identifying two main entities, the designer might also identify the composite bridge entity that represents the many-to-many relationship between those two main entities. 11. List and briefly explain the activities involved in the verification of an ER model. Section 9-4c, “Data Model Verification,” includes a discussion on verification. In addition, Appendix C, “The University Lab: Conceptual Design Verification, Logical Design, and Implementation,” covers the verification process in detail. The verification process is detailed in the text’s Table 9.5, reproduced here for your convenience. TABLE 9.5 The ER Model Verification Process STEP ACTIVITY 1 Identify the ER model’s central entity. 2 Identify each module and its components. 3 Identify each module’s transaction requirements: Internal: Updates/Inserts/Deletes/Queries/Reports External: Module interfaces 4 Verify all processes against the module’s processing and reporting requirements. 5 Make all necessary changes suggested in Step 4. 6 Repeat Steps 2−5 for all modules. Keep in mind that the verification process requires the continuous verification of business transactions as well as system and user requirements. The verification sequence must be repeated for each of the system’s modules. 12. What factors are important in a DBMS software selection? The selection of DBMS software is critical to the information system’s smooth operation. Consequently, the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed DBMS software should be carefully studied. To avoid false expectations, the end user must be made aware of the limitations of both the DBMS and the
  • 14. Chapter 9 Database Design 270 database. Although the factors affecting the purchasing decision vary from company to company, some of the most common are: • Cost. Purchase, maintenance, operational, license, installation, training, and conversion costs. • DBMS features and tools. Some database software includes a variety of tools that facilitate the application development task. For example, the availability of query by example (QBE), screen painters, report generators, application generators, data dictionaries, and so on, helps to create a more pleasant work environment for both the end user and the application programmer. Database administrator facilities, query facilities, ease of use, performance, security, concurrency control, transaction processing, and third-party support also influence DBMS software selection. • Underlying model. Hierarchical, network, relational, object/relational, or object. • Portability. Across platforms, systems, and languages. • DBMS hardware requirements. Processor(s), RAM, disk space, and so on. 13. List and briefly explain the four steps performed during the logical design stage. 1) Map conceptual model to logical model components. In this step, the conceptual model is converted into a set of table definitions including table names, column names, primary keys, and foreign keys to implement the entities and relationships specified in the conceptual design. 2) Validate the logical model using normalization. It is possible for normalization issues to be discovered during the process of mapping the conceptual model to logical model components. Therefore, it is appropriate at this stage to validate that all of the table definitions from the previous step conform to the appropriate normalization rules. 3) Validate logical model integrity constraints. This step involves the conversion of attribute domains and constraints into constraint definitions that can be implemented within the DBMS to enforce those domains. Also, entity and referential integrity constraints are validated. Views may be defined to enforce security constraints. 4) Validate the logical model against the user requirements. The final step of this stage is to ensure that all definitions created throughout the logical model are validated against the users' data, transaction, and security requirements. Every component (table, view, constraint, etc.) of the logical model must be associated with satisfying the user requirements, and every user requirement should be addressed by the model components. 14. List and briefly explain the three steps performed during the physical design stage. 1) Define data storage organization. Based on estimates of the data volume and growth, this step involves the determination of the physical location and physical organization for each table. Also, which columns will be indexed and the type of indexes to be used are determined. Finally, the type of implementation to be used for each view is decided. 2) Define integrity and security measures. This step involves creating users and security groups, and then assigning privileges and controls to those users and group. 3) Determine performance measurements.
  • 15. Chapter 9 Database Design 271 The actual performance of the physical database implementation must be measured and assessed for compliance with user performance requirements. 15. What three levels of backup may be used in database recovery management? Briefly describe what each of those three backup levels does. A full backup of the database creates a backup copy of all database objects in their entirety. A differential backup of the database creates a backup of only those database objects that have changed since the last full backup. A transaction log backup does not create a backup of database objects, but makes a backup of the log of changes that have been applied to the database objects since the last backup. Problem Solutions 1. The ABC Car Service & Repair Centers are owned by the SILENT car dealer; ABC services and repairs only SILENT cars. Three ABC Car Service & Repair Centers provide service and repair for the entire state. Each of the three centers is independently managed and operated by a shop manager, a receptionist, and at least eight mechanics. Each center maintains a fully stocked parts inventory. Each center also maintains a manual file system in which each car’s maintenance history is kept: repairs made, parts used, costs, service dates, owner, and so on. Files are also kept to track inventory, purchasing, billing, employees’ hours, and payroll. You have been contacted by the manager of one of the centers to design and implement a computerized system. Given the preceding information, do the following: a. Indicate the most appropriate sequence of activities by labeling each of the following steps in the correct order. (For example, if you think that “Load the database.” is the appropriate first step, label it “1.”) ____ Normalize the conceptual model. ____ Obtain a general description of company operations. ____ Load the database. ____ Create a description of each system process. ____ Test the system. ____ Draw a data flow diagram and system flowcharts. ____ Create a conceptual model, using ER diagrams. ____ Create the application programs. ____ Interview the mechanics. ____ Create the file (table) structures. ____ Interview the shop manager. The answer to this question may vary slightly from one designer to the next, depending on the selected design methodology and even on personal designer preferences. Yet, in spite of such differences, it is possible to develop a common design methodology to permit the development of a basic
  • 16. Chapter 9 Database Design 272 decision-making process and the analysis required in designing an information system. Whatever the design philosophy, a good designer uses a specific and ordered set of steps through which the database design problem is approached. The steps are generally based on three phases: analysis, design, and implementation. These phases yield the following activities: ANALYSIS 1. Interview the shop manager 2. Interview the mechanics 3. Obtain a general description of company operations 4. Create a description of each system process DESIGN 5. Create a conceptual model, using E-R diagrams 6. 8. Draw a data flow diagram and system flow charts 7. Normalize the conceptual model IMPLEMENTATION 8. Create the table structures 9. Load the database 10. Create the application programs 11. Test the system. This listing implies that, within each of the three phases, the steps are completed in a specific order. For example, it would seem reasonable to argue that we must first complete the interviews if we are to obtain a proper description of the company operations. Similarly, we may argue that a data flow diagram precedes the creation of the E-R diagram. Nevertheless, the specific tasks and the order in which they are addressed may vary. Such variations do not matter, as long as the designer bases the selected procedures on an appropriate design philosophy, such as top-down vs. bottom-up. Given this discussion, we may present problem 1's solution this way: __7__ Normalize the conceptual model. __3__ Obtain a general description of company operations. __9__ Load the database. __4__ Create a description of each system process. _11__ Test the system. __6__ Draw a data flow diagram and system flow charts. __5__ Create a conceptual model, using E-R diagrams.
  • 17. Chapter 9 Database Design 273 _10__ Create the application programs. __2__ Interview the mechanics. __8__ Create the file (table) structures. __1__ Interview the shop manager.
  • 18. Chapter 9 Database Design 274 b. Describe the various modules that you believe the system should include. This question may be addressed in several ways. We suggest the following approach to develop a system composed of four main modules: Inventory, Payroll, Work order, and Customer. We have illustrated the Information System's main modules in Figure P9.1B. Figure P9.1B The ABC Company’s IS System Modules The Inventory module will include the Parts and Purchasing sub-modules. The Payroll Module will handle all employee and payroll information. The Work order module keeps track of the car maintenance history and all work orders for maintenance done on a car. The Customer module keeps track of the billing of the work orders to the customers and of the payments received from those customers. c. How will a data dictionary help you develop the system? Give examples. We have addressed the role of the data dictionary within the DBLC in detail in the answer to review question 10. Remember that the data dictionary makes it easier to check for the existence of synonyms and homonyms, to check whether all attributes exist to support required reports, to verify appropriate relationship representations, and so on. Therefore, the data dictionary's contents will help us to provide consistency across modules and to evaluate the system's ability to generate the required reports. In addition, the use of the data dictionary facilitates the creation of system documentation.
  • 19. Chapter 9 Database Design 275 d. What general (system) recommendations might you make to the shop manager? (For example. if the system will be integrated, what modules will be integrated? What benefits would be derived from such an integrated system? Include several general recommendations.) The designer's job is to provide solutions to the main problems found during the initial study. Clearly, any system is subject to both internal and external constraints. For example, we can safely assume that the owner of the ABC Car Service and Repair Center has a time frame in mind, not to mention a spending limitation. As is true in all design work, the designer and the business owner must prioritize the modules and develop those that yield the greatest benefit within the stated time and development budget constraints. Keep in mind that it is always useful to develop a modular system that provides for future enhancement and expansion. Suppose, for example, that the ABC Car Service & Repair company management decides to integrate all of its service stations in the state in order to provide better statewide service. Such integration is likely to yield many benefits: The car history of each car will be available to any station for cars that have been serviced in more than one location; the inventory of parts will be on-line, thus allowing parts orders to be placed between service stations; mechanics can better share tips concerning the solution to car maintenance problems, and so on. e. What is the best approach to conceptual database design? Why? Given the nature of this business, the best way to produce this conceptual database design would be to use a centralized and top-down approach. Keep in mind that the designer must keep the design sufficiently flexible to make sure that it can accommodate any future integration of this system with the other service stations in the state. f. Name and describe at least four reports the system should have. Explain their use. Who will use those reports? REPORT 1 Monthly Activity contains a summary of service categories by branch and by month. Such reports may become the basis for forecasting personnel and stock requirements for each branch and for each period. REPORT 2 Mechanic Summary Sheet contains a summary of work hours clocked by each mechanic. This report would be generated weekly and would be useful for payroll and maintenance personnel scheduling purposes. REPORT 3 Monthly Inventory contains a summary of parts in inventory, inventory draw-down, parts reorder points, and information about the vendors who will provide the parts to be reordered. This report will be especially useful for inventory management purposes. REPORT 4 Customer Activity contains a breakdown of customers by location, maintenance activity, current balances, available credit, and so on. This report would be useful to forecast various service demand factors, to mail promotional materials, to send maintenance reminders, to keep track of special
  • 20. Chapter 9 Database Design 276 customer requirements, and so on. 2. Suppose you have been asked to create an information system for a manufacturing plant that produces nuts and bolts of many shapes, sizes, and functions. What questions would you ask, and how would the answers to those questions affect the database design? Basically, all answers to all (relevant) questions help shape the database design. In fact, all information collected during the initial study and all subsequent phases will have an impact on the database design. Keep in mind that the information is collected to establish the entities, attributes, and the relationships among the entities. Specifically, the relationships, connectivities, and cardinalities are shaped by the business rules that are derived from the information collected by the designer. Sample questions and their likely impact on the design might be: • Do you want to develop the database for all departments at once, or do you want to design and implement the database for one department at a time? • How will the design approach affect the design process? (In other words, assess top-down vs. bottom-up, centralized or decentralized, system scope and boundaries.) • Do you want to develop one module at a time, or do you want an integrated system? (Inventory, production, shipping, billing, etc.) • Do you want to keep track of the nuts and bolts by lot number, production shift, type, and department? Impact: conceptual and logical database design. • Do you want to keep track of the suppliers of each batch of raw material used in the production of the nuts and bolts? Impact: conceptual and logical database design. E-R model. • Do you want to keep track of the customers who received the batches of nuts and bolts? Impact: conceptual and logical database design. ER model. • What reports will you require, what will be the specific reporting requirements, and to whom will these reports be distributed? The answers to such questions affect the conceptual and logical database design, the database’s implementation, its testing, and its subsequent operation. a. What do you envision the SDLC to be? The SDLC is not a function of the information collected. Regardless of the extent of the design or its specific implementation, the SDLC phases remain: PLANNING Initial assessment Feasibility study ANALYSIS User requirements Study of existing systems Logical system design DETAILED SYSTEMS DESIGN Detailed system specifications
  • 21. Chapter 9 Database Design 277 IMPLEMENTATION Coding, testing, debugging Installation, fine-tuning MAINTENANCE Evaluation Maintenance Enhancements b. What do you envision the DBLC to be? As is true for the SDLC, the DBLC is not a function of the kind and extent of the collected information. Thus, the DBLC phases and their activities remain as shown: DATABASE INITIAL STUDY Analyze the company situation Define problems and constraints Define objectives Define scope and boundaries DATABASE DESIGN Create the conceptual design Create the logical design create the physical design IMPLEMENTATION AND LOADING Install the DBMS Create the database(s) Load or convert the data TESTING AND EVALUATION Test the database Fine-tune the database Evaluate the database and its application programs OPERATION Produce the required information flow MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION Introduce changes Make enhancements 3. Suppose you perform the same functions noted in Problem 2 for a larger warehousing operation. How are the two sets of procedures similar? How and why are they different? The development of an information system will differ in the approach and philosophy used. More
  • 22. Chapter 9 Database Design 278 precisely, the designer team will probably be formed by a group of system analysts and may decide to use a decentralized approach to database design. Also, as is true for any organization, the system scope and constraints may be very different for different systems. Therefore, designers may opt to use different techniques at different stages. For example, the database initial study phase may include separate studies carried out by separate design teams at several geographically distant locations. Each of the findings of the design teams will later be integrated to identify the main problems, solutions, and opportunities that will guide the design and development of the system. 4. Using the same procedures and concepts employed in Problem 1, how would you create an information system for the Tiny College example in Chapter 4? Tiny College is a medium-sized educational institution that uses many database-intensive operations, such as student registration, academic administration, inventory management, and payroll. To create an information system, first perform an initial database study to determine the information system's objectives. Next, study Tiny College's operations and processes (flow of data) to identify the main problems, constraints, and opportunities. A precise definition of the main problems and constraints will enable the designer to make sure that the design improves Tiny College's operational efficiency. An improvement in operational efficiency is likely to create opportunities to provide new services that will enhance Tiny College's competitive position. After the initial database study is done and the alternative solutions are presented, the end users ultimately decide which one of the probable solutions is most appropriate for Tiny College. Keep in mind that the development of a system this size will probably involve people who have quite different backgrounds. For example, it is likely that the designer must work with people who play a managerial role in communications and local area networks, as well as with the "troops in the trenches" such as programmers and system operators. The designer should, therefore, expect that there will be a wide range of opinions concerning the proposed system's features. It is the designer's job to reconcile the many (and often conflicting) views of the "ideal" system. Once a proposed solution has been agreed upon, the designer(s) may determine the proposed system's scope and boundaries. We are then able to begin the design phase. As the design phase begins, keep in mind that Tiny College's information system is likely to be used by many users (20 to 40 minimum) who are located on distant sites across campus. Therefore, the designer must consider a range of communication issues involving the use of such technologies as local area networks. These technologies must be considered as the database designer(s) begin to develop the structure of the database to be implemented. The remaining development work conforms to the SDLC and the DBLC phases. Special attention must be given to the system design's implementation and testing to ensure that all the system modules interface properly. Finally, the designer(s) must provide all the appropriate system documentation and ensure that all
  • 23. Chapter 9 Database Design 279 appropriate system maintenance procedures (periodic backups, security checks, etc.) are in place to ensure the system's proper operation. Keep in mind that two very important issues in a university-wide system are end-user training and support. Therefore, the system designer(s) must make sure that all end users know the system and know how it is to be used to enjoy its benefits. In other words, make sure that end-user support programs are in place when the system becomes operational. 5. Write the proper sequence of activities in the design of a video rental database. (The initial ERD was shown in Figure 9.9.) The design must support all rental activities, customer payment tracking, and employee work schedules, as well as track which employees checked out the videos to the customers. After you finish writing the design activity sequence, complete the ERD to ensure that the database design can be successfully implemented. (Make sure that the design is normalized properly and that it can support the required transactions. Given its level of detail and (relative) complexity, this problem would make an excellent class project. Use the chapter’s coverage of the database life cycle (DBLC) as the procedural template. The text’s Figure 9.3 is particularly useful as a procedural map for this problem’s solution and Figure 9.6 provides a more detailed view of the database design’s procedural flow. Make sure that the students review section 9-3b, “Database Design,” before they attempt to produce the problem solution. Appendix B, “The University Lab: Conceptual Design,” and Appendix C “The University Lab: Conceptual Design Verification, Logical Design, and Implementation” show a very detailed example of the procedures required to deliver a completed database. You will find a more detailed video rental database problem description in Appendix B, problem 4. This problem requires the completion of the initial database design. The solution is shown in this manual’s Appendix B coverage. This design is verified in Appendix C, Problem 2. The Visio Professional files for the initial and verified designs are located on your instructor’s CD. Select the FigB-P04a-The-Initial-Crows-Foot-ERD-for-the-Video-Rental-Store.vsd file to see the initial design. Select the Fig-C-P02a-The-Revised-Video-Rental-Crows-Foot-ERD.vsd file to see the verified design. 6. In a construction company, a new system has been in place for a few months and now there is a list of possible changes/updates that need to be done. For each of the changes/updates, specify what type of maintenance needs to be done: (a) corrective, (b) adaptive, and (c) perfective. a. An error in the size of one of the fields has been identified and it needs to be updated status field needs to be changed. This is a change in response to a system error – corrective maintenance. b. The company is expanding into a new type of service and this will require to enhancing the system with a new set of tables to support this new service and integrate it with the existing data. This is a change to enhance the system – perfective maintenance.
  • 24. Chapter 9 Database Design 280 c. The company has to comply with some government regulations. To do this, it will require adding a couple of fields to the existing system tables. This is a change in response to changes in the business environment – adaptive maintenance. 7. You have been assigned to design the database for a new soccer club. Indicate the most appropriate sequence of activities by labeling each of the following steps in the correct order. (For example, if you think that “Load the database” is the appropriate first step, label it “1.”) _10__ Create the application programs. __4__ Create a description of each system process. _11__ Test the system. __9__ Load the database. __7__ Normalize the conceptual model. __1__ Interview the soccer club president. __5__ Create a conceptual model using ER diagrams. __2__ Interview the soccer club director of coaching. __8__ Create the file (table) structures. __3__ Obtain a general description of the soccer club operations. __6__ Draw a data flow diagram and system flowcharts.
  • 25. Another Random Scribd Document with Unrelated Content
  • 26. women who have studied the art thoroughly; and who are adepts in the use of every weapon known—using each according to circumstances and the nature of the victim, and using each with deadly precision. From such may a kind Providence deliver us! As the tender mercies of the wicked, so are the scientific flirts—the women and the men who play at bowls with human hearts, for the stakes of a whole life's happiness on the one side and a few weeks of gratified vanity on the other. It used to be an old schoolboy maxim that no real gentleman could be refused by a lady, because no real gentleman could presume beyond his line of encouragement. À fortiori, no lady would or could give more encouragement than she meant. What are we to say then of our flirts if this maxim be true? Are they really 'no gentlemen' and 'no ladies,' according to the famous formula of the kitchen? Perhaps it would be said so if gentlehood meant now, as it meant centuries ago, the real worth and virtue of humanity. For flirting with intent is a cruel, false, heartless amusement; and time was when cruelty and falsehood were essentially sins which vitiated all claims to gentlehood. And yet the world would be very dull without that innocent kind of nonsense which often goes by the name of flirting— that pleasant something which is more than mere acquaintanceship and less than formal loverhood—that bright and animated intercourse which makes the hours pass so easily, yet which leaves no bitter pang of self-reproach—that indefinite and undefinable interest by which the one man or the one woman becomes a kind of microcosm for the time, the epitome of all that is pleasant and of all that is lovely. The only caution to be observed is:—Do not go too far.
  • 27. SCRAMBLERS. There are people who are never what Northern housewives call 'straight'—people who seem to have been born in a scramble, who live in a scramble, and who, when their time comes, will die in a scramble, just able to scrawl their signature to a will that ought to have been made years ago, and that does not embody their real intentions now. Emphatically the Unready, they are never prepared for anything, whether expected or unexpected; they make no plans more stable than good intentions; and they neither calculate nor foresee. Everything with them is hurry and confusion; not because they have more to do than other people, but because they do it more loosely and less methodically—because they have not learnt the art of dovetailing nor the mystery of packing. Consequently half their pleasures and more than half their duties slip through their fingers for want of the knack of compact holding; and their lives are passed in trying to pick up what they have let drop and in frantic endeavours to remedy their mistakes. For scramblers are always making mistakes and going through an endless round of forgetting. They never remember their engagements, but accept in the blandest and frankest way imaginable two or more invitations for the same day and hour, and assure you quite seriously when, taught by experience, you push them hard and probe them deep, that they have no engagement whatever on hand and are certain not to fail you. In an evil hour you trust to them. When the day comes they suddenly wake to the fact that they had accepted Mrs. So-and-So's invitation before yours; and all you get for your empty place and your careful arrangements ruthlessly upset, is a hurried note of apology which comes perhaps in the middle of dinner, perhaps sometime next day, when too late to be of use. If they forget their own engagements they also ignore yours, no matter how distinctly you may have tabulated them; and are sure to
  • 28. come rattling to your house on the day when you said emphatically you were engaged and could not see them. If you keep to your programme and refuse to admit them, more likely than not you affront them. Engagements being in their eyes moveable feasts, which it does not in the least degree signify whether they keep on the date set down or not, they cannot understand your rigidity of purpose; and were it not that as a tribe they are good-natured, and too fluid to hold even annoyance for any length of time, you would in all probability have a quarrel fastened on you because your scrambling friends chose to make a calendar for themselves and to insist on your setting your diary by it. As they ignore your appointed hours, so do they forget your street and number. They always stick to your first card, though you may have moved many times since it was printed, duly apprizing them of each change as it occurred. That does not help you, for they never note the changes of their friends' addresses, but keep loyally to the first. It all comes to the same in the end, they say, and the postman is cleverer than they. But they do not often trouble their friends with letters on their own account, for they have a speciality for not answering such as are written to them. When they do by chance answer them, they never reply to the questions asked nor give the news demanded. They do not even reply to invitations like other people, but leave you to infer from their silence the acceptance or rejection they are meditating. When they in their turn invite you, they generally puzzle you by mismatching the day of the week with the date of the month, leaving you tormented with doubt which you are to go by; and they forget to give you the hour. Besides this, they write an illegible hand; and they are famous for the blots they make and the Queen's heads they omit. A scrambling wife is no light cross to a man who values order and regularity as part of his home life. She may be, and probably is, the best-tempered creature in the world—a peevish scrambler would be too unendurable—but a fresh face, bright eyes and a merry laugh do not atone for never-ending disorder and discomfort. This kind of
  • 29. thing does not depend on income and is not to be remedied by riches. The households where my lady has nothing to do but let her maid keep her to the hours she herself has appointed are just as uncomfortable in their way as poorer establishments, if my lady is a scrambler, and cannot be taught method and the value of holding on by the forelock. Sometimes my lady gets herself into such an inextricable coil of promises and engagements, all crossing each other, that in despair she takes to her bed and gives herself out as ill, and so cuts what she cannot untie. People wonder at her sudden indisposition, looking as she did only yesterday in the bloom of health; and they wonder at her radiant reappearance in a day or two without a trace of even languor upon her. They do not know that her retirement was simply a version of the famous rope trick, and that, like the Brothers Davenport, she went into the dark to shake herself free of the cords with which she had suffered herself to be bound. It is a short and easy method certainly, but it has rather too much of the echo of 'Wolf' in it to bear frequent repetition. In houses of a lower grade, where the lady is her own housekeeper, the habit of scrambling of course leads to far greater and more manifest confusion. The servants catch from the mistress the trick of overstaying time; and punctuality at last comes to mean an elastic margin, where fixed duties and their appointed times appear cometically at irregular intervals. The cook is late with dinner; the coachman begins to put-to a little after the hour he was ordered to be at the door; but they know that, however late they are, the chances are ten to one their mistress will not be ready for them, and that in her heart she will be grateful to them for the shelter their own unpunctuality affords her. This being so, they take their time and dawdle at their pleasure; thus adding to the pressure which always comes at the end of the scrambler's day, when everything is thrown into a chaotic mass and nothing comes out straight or complete. Did any one ever know a scrambling woman ready at the moment in her own house? That she should be punctual to any appointment
  • 30. out of her house is, of course, not to be thought of; but she makes an awkward thing of it sometimes at home. Her guests are often all assembled, and the dinner hour has struck, before she has torn off one gown and dragged on another. What she cannot tie she pins; and her pins are many and demonstrative. She wisps up her hair, not having left herself time to braid it; and the consequence is that before she has been half an hour in the room ends and tails are sure to stray playfully from their fastenings and come tumbling about her ears. Her jewels are mismatched, her colours ill-assorted, her belt is awry, her bouquet falling to pieces. She rushes into the drawing- room in her morning slippers, smiling and good-tempered, with a patch-work look about her—something forgotten in her attire that makes her whole appearance shaky and unfinished—fastening her last button or clasping on her first bracelet. She is full of regrets and excuses delivered in her joyous, buoyant manner, or in a voice so winning, an accent so coaxing, that you cannot be annoyed. Besides, you leave the annoyance to her husband, who is sure to have in reserve a pickle quite sufficiently strong for the inevitable rod, as the poor scrambler knows too well. All you can do is to accept her apologies with a good grace, and to carry away with you a vivid recollection of an awkward half-hour, a spoilt dinner, and a scrambling hostess all abroad and out of time, sweeping through the room very heated, very good-tempered, only half-dressed and chronically out of breath. Scramblers can never learn the value of money, neither for themselves nor for others. They are famous for borrowing small sums which they forget to return; but, to do them justice, they are just as willing to lend what they never dream of asking for again. Long ago they caught hold of the fact that money is only a circulating medium, and they have added an extra speed to the circulation at which slower folk stand aghast. To be sure, the practical results of their theory are not very satisfactory, and the confusion between the possessive pronouns which distinguishes their financial catechism is apt to lead to unpleasant issues.
  • 31. Scrambling women are especially notorious for the way in which they set themselves afloat without sufficient means to carry them on; finding themselves stranded in mid-career because they have made no calculations and have forgotten the rule of subtraction. They find themselves at a small Italian town, say, where the virtues of the British banking system are unknown, and where their letters of credit and circular notes are not worth more than the value of the paper they are written on. More than one British matron of respectable condition and weak arithmetic has found herself in such a plight as this, with her black-eyed landlord perfectly civil and well- bred, but as firm as a rock in his resolution that the Signora shall not depart out of his custody till his little account is paid—a plight out of which she has to scramble the best way she can, with the loss perhaps of a little dignity and of more repute—at least in the locality where her solid scudi gave out and her precious paper could not be cashed. This is the same woman who offers an omnibus conductor a sovereign for a three-penny fare; who gives the village grocer a ten- pound note for a shilling's-worth of sugar; and who, when she comes up to London for a day's shopping, and has got her last parcel made up and ready to be put into her cab, finds she has not left herself half enough money to pay for it—with a shopman whose faith in human nature is by no means lively, and who only last week was bitten by a lady swindler of undeniable manners and appearance, and not very unlike herself. She has been known too, to go into a confectioner's and, after having made an excellent luncheon, to find to her dismay that she has left her purse in the pocket of her other dress at home, and that she has not six-pence about her. In fact there is not an equivocal position in which forgetfulness, want of method, want of foresight, and all the other characteristics which make up scrambling in the concrete, can place her, in which she has not been at some time or other. But no experience teaches her; the scrambler she was born, the scrambler she will die, and to the last will tumble through her life, all her ends flying and deprecating excuses on her lips.
  • 32. Scramblers are notoriously great for making promises, and as notorious for not performing what they promise. Kindhearted as they are in general, and willing to do their friends a service—going out of their way indeed to proffer kindnesses quite beyond your expectations and the range of their duties towards you, and always undertaking works of supererogation; which works in fact lead to more than half their normal scramble—they forget the next hour the promise on which you have based your dearest hopes. Or, if they do not forget it, they find it is crowded out of time by a multitude of engagements and prior promises, of all of which they were innocently oblivious when they offered to do your business so frankly, and swore so confidently they would set about it now at once and get it out of hand without delay. The oath and the offer which you took to be as sure as the best chain-cable, you will find on trial to be only a rope of sand that could not bind so much as a bunch of tow together, still less hold the anchor of a life; and many a heart, sick with hope deferred and wrung with the disappointment which might have been so easily prevented, has been half broken before now from the anguish that has followed on the failure of the kindhearted scrambler to perform the promise voluntarily made, and the service earnestly pressed on a reluctant acceptor. This is the tragic side of the scrambler's career, the shadow thrown by almost every one of the class. For all the minor delinquencies of hurry and unpunctuality in social affairs it is not difficult to find full and ample forgiveness; but when it comes to untrustworthiness in graver matters, then the scrambler becomes a scourge instead of only an inconvenience. The only safe way of dealing with the class is to take them when we can get hold of them, and to accept them for what they are worth; but not to rely on them, and not to attempt any mortising of our own affairs with their promises. They are the froth and foam of society, pretty and pleasant enough in the sunlight as they splash and splutter about the rocks; but they are not the deep waters which bear the burden of our ships and by which the life of the world is maintained.
  • 34. FLATTERY. Nothing is so delightful as flattery. To hear and believe pleasant fictions about oneself is a temptation too seductive for weak mortals to resist, as the typical legends of all mythologies and the private histories of most individuals show; in consequence of which, home truths, to one used to ideal portraiture, come like draughts of 'bitter cup' to the dram-drinker. And flattery is dram-drinking; and yet not quite without good uses to balance its undeniable evil, if it be only exaggeration and not wholly falsehood; that is, if it assumes as a matter of course the presence of virtues potential to your character but not always active, and praises you for what you might be if you chose to live up to your best. Many a weak brother and weaker sister, and all children, can be heartened into goodness by a little dash of judicious praise or flattery where ponderous exhortation and grave reproof would fail; just as a heavily-laden horse can be coaxed up-hill when the whip and spur would lead to untimely jibbing. If, on the contrary, the flattery is of a kind that makes you believe yourself an exceptionally fine fellow when you are only 'mean trash'—a king of men when you are nothing better nor nobler than a moral nigger —making you satisfied with yourself when at your worst—then it is an unmitigated evil; for it then becomes dram-drinking of a very poisonous kind, which sooner or later does for your soul what unlimited blue ruin does for your body. But this is what we generally mean when we speak of flattery; and this is the kind which has such a deservedly bad name from moralists of all ages. The flatteries of men to women, and those of women to men, are very different in kind and direction. Men flatter women for what they are—for their beauty, their grace, their sweetness, their charmingness in general; while a woman will flatter a man for what he does—for his speech in the House last night, of which she understands little; for his book, of which she understands less; or for
  • 35. his pleading, of which she understands nothing at all. Not that this signifies much on either side. The most unintellectual little woman in the world has brains enough to look up in your face sweetly, and breathe out something that sounds like 'beautiful—charming—so clever,' vaguely sketching the outline of a hymn of praise to which your own vanity supplies the versicles. For you must have an exceptionally strong head if you can rate the sketch at its real value and see for yourself how utterly meaningless it is. You may be the most mystical poet of the day, suggesting to your acutest readers grave doubts as to your own power of comprehending yourself; or you may be the most subtle metaphysician, to follow whom in your labyrinth of reasoning requires perhaps the rarest order of brains to be met with; but you will nevertheless believe any narrow-browed, small-headed woman who tells you in a low sweet voice, with a gentle uplifting of her eyes and a suggestive curve of her lip, that she has found you both intelligible and charming, and that she quite agrees with you and shares your every sentiment. If she further tells you that all her life long she has thought in exactly the same way but was wholly unable to express herself, and that you have now supplied her want and translated into words her vague ideas, and if she says this with a reverential kind of effusiveness, you are done for, so far as your critical power goes; and should some candid friend, whom she has not flattered, tell you with brutal frankness that your bewitching little flatterer has neither the brains nor the education to understand you, you will set him down as a slanderer, spiteful and malignant, and call his candour envy because he has not been so lucky as yourself. The most subtle form of flattery is that which asks your advice with the pretence of needing it—your advice, particularly—yours above that of all other persons, as the wisest, best, most useful to be obtained. This too is a form that belongs rather to women in their relations with men than the converse; though sometimes men will pretend to want a woman's advice about their love affairs, and will perhaps make-believe to be guided by it. Not unfrequently, however,
  • 36. asking one woman's opinion and advice about another is a masked manner of love-making on its own account; though sometimes it may be done for flattery only, when there are reasons. Of course not all advice-asking is flattery; but when intended only to please and not meant to be genuine, it is perhaps one of the most potent instruments of the art to be met with. But if seeking advice be the most subtle form of flattery, the most intoxicating is that which pretends to moral elevation or reform by your influence. The reformation of a rake is a work which no woman alive could be found to resist if the rake offered it to her as his last chance of salvation; and to lead a pretty sinner back to the ways of picturesque virtue by his own influence only is a temptation to self- reliance which no man could refuse—a flattery which not Diogenes nor Zeno himself could see through. The pretensions of any one else would be laughed at cruelly enough; but this is one of the things where personal experience and critical judgment never go in harness together—one of the manifestations of flattery which would overcome the calmest and bewilder the wisest. Priests of all denominations are especially open to this kind of flattery; not only from pretty sinners who have gone openly out of the right line, but from quite comely and respectable maids and matrons who have lived blamelessly so far as the broad moral distinctions go, yet who have not lived the Awakened Life until roused thereunto by this peculiarly favoured minister. It is a tremendous trial of a man's discernment when such flattery is offered to him. How much of this pretended awakening is real? How much of this sudden spiritual insight is true, and not a mere phrasing, artfully adopted for pleasantness only? These are the cases where we most want that famous spear of Ithuriel to help us to a right estimate, for they are beyond the power of any ordinary man to determine. But if priests are subject to these delusions of flattery on the one hand, they know how to practise them on the other. Take away the flattery which, mingled with occasional rebuke, forms the great
  • 37. ministerial spur, and both Revivalism and Ritualism would flag like flowers without 'the gentle dews.' Scolded for their faults in dress, for their vanity, extravagance and other feminine vices, are not women also flattered as the favourites of heaven and of the Church? Are they not told that they are the lilies of the ecclesiastical garden? the divinely appointed missionaries for the preservation of virtue and godly truth in the world? without whom the coarser race of men would be given over to inconceivable spiritual evil, to infidelity and all immorality. We may be very sure of this, that if humanity, and especially feminine humanity, were not flattered as well as chastened, clerical influence would not last for a day. There is one kind of flattery which is common to both men and women, and that is the expressed preference of sex. Thus, when men want to flatter women, they say how infinitely they prefer their society to that of their own sex; and women will say the same to men. Or, if they do not say it, they will act it. See a set of women congregated together without the light of a manly countenance among them. They may talk to each other certainly; and one or two will sit away together and discuss their private affairs with animation; but the great mass of them are only half vitalized while waiting the advent of the men to rouse them into life and the desire to please. No man who goes up first from the dinner-table, and earlier than he was expected, can fail to see the change which comes over those wearied, limp, indifferent-looking faces and figures so soon as he enters the room. He is like the prince whose kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty and all her court; and can any one say that this is not flattery of the most delightful kind? To be the Pygmalion even for a moment, and for the weakest order of soul-giving, is about the greatest pleasure that a man can know, if he be susceptible to the finer kinds of flattery. Some women indeed, not only show their preference for men, but openly confess it, and confess at the same time to a lofty contempt or abhorrence for the society of women. These are generally women who are, or have been, beauties; or who have literary and
  • 38. intellectual pretensions; or who despise babies and contemn housekeeping, and profess themselves unable to talk to other women because of their narrowness and stupidity. But for the most part they are women who, by their beauty or their position, have been used to receive extra attention from men; and thus their preference is not flattery so much as exigence. Women who have been in India, or wherever else they are in the minority in society, are of this kind; and nothing is more amazing to them when they first come home than the attentions which a certain style of Englishwoman pays to men, instead of demanding and receiving attentions from them. There are also those sweet, humble, caressing women who flatter you with every word and look, but whose flattery is nothing but a pretty dress put on for show and taken off when the show is done with. Anything serves for an occasion with these people. Why, the way in which certain unmarried women will caress a child before you is an implied flattery; and they know it. If only they would be careful to carry these pretty ante-nuptial ways into the home where nothing is to be gained by them but a humdrum husband's happiness! But too often the woman whose whole attitude was one of flattering devotion before her end was gained, gives up every shred of that which she had in such profusion, when she has attained her object, and lets the home go bare of that which was so beautiful and seductive in the ball-room and the flirting corner. Some men however, want more home flattery to keep them tolerably happy and up to the mark than any woman with a soul to be saved by truth can give. Poets and artists are of this kind—men who literally live on praise, without which they droop and can do nothing. With them it is absolutely necessary that the people with whom they are associated should be of appreciative and sympathetic natures; but the burden comes heavy when they want, as they generally do, so much more than this. For, in truth, they want flattery in excess of sympathy; and if they do not get it they hold themselves as the victims of an unkind fate, and fill the world with the echo of their
  • 39. woes. This is nine-tenths of the cause why great geniuses are so often unhappy in married life. They demand more incessant flattery than can be kept up by one woman, unless she has not only an exceptional power of love but also an exceptional power of self- suppression. They think that by virtue of their genius they are entitled to a Benjamin's mess of devotion double that given to other men; and when they get only Judah's share, they cry out that they are ill-used, and make the world think them ill-used as well. But though a little home flattery helps the home life immeasurably, and greases the creaking domestic wheels more than anything else can, a great deal is just the most pernicious thing that can be offered. The belief prevalent in some families that all the very small and commonplace members thereof are the world's wonders and greater than any one else—that no one is so clever as Harry, no one so pretty as Julia, that Amy's red hair is of a more brilliant gold than can be found elsewhere, and Edward's mathematical abilities about equal to Newton's—this belief, nourished and acted on, is sure to turn out an insufferable collection of prigs and self-conceited damsels who have to be brought down innumerable pegs before they find their own level. But we often see this; especially in country places where there is not much society to give a standard for comparative measurement; and we know that those fond parents and doting relations are blindly and diligently sowing seeds of bitterness for a future harvest of sorrow for their darlings. These young people must be made to suffer if they are to be of any good whatever in the world; and finding their level, after the exalted position which they have been supposed to fill so long, and being pelted with the unsavoury missiles of truth in exchange for all the incense of flattery to which they have been used, will be suffering enough. But it has to be gone through; this being one of the penalties to which the unwisdom of love so often subjects its objects. The flattery met with in society is not often very harmful save to coarse or specially simple natures. You must be either one or the
  • 40. other to be able to believe it. Lady Morgan was perhaps the most unblushing and excessive of the tribe of social flatterers; but that was her engine, the ladder by which she did a good part of her climbing. We must not confound with this kind of flattery the impulsive expression of praise or love which certain outspoken people indulge in to the last. You may as well try to dam up Niagara as to make some folks reticent of their thoughts and feelings. And when one of this kind sees anything that he or she likes, the praise has to come out, with superlatives if the creature be prone to exaggeration. But this is not flattery; it is merely a certain childlike expansiveness which lasts with some into quite old age. Unfortunately, very few understand this childlike expansiveness when they see it. Hence it subjects its possessor to misrepresentation and unfriendly jibes, so soon as his or her back is turned, and the explosion of exaggerated but perfectly sincere praise is discussed critically by the uninterested part of the audience.
  • 41. LA FEMME PASSÉE. Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their personal value, so much of their natural final cause, that when these are gone many feel as if their whole career were at an end, and as if nothing were left to them now that they are no longer young enough to be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as mature sirens are admired. For women of a certain position have so little wholesome occupation, and so little ambition for anything save indeed that miserable thing called 'getting on in society,' that they cannot change their way of life with advancing years. Hence they do not attempt to find interest in things outside themselves, and independent of the personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole pleasure of existence. This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who have staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic. With the ideal woman of middle age—that pleasant She with her calm face and soft manner, who unites the charms of both epochs, retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider sympathies of experience—with her there has been no such struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains beautiful to the last—far more beautiful than all the pastes and washes in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an atmosphere of her own—an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for the time. All children and all young persons love her, because she
  • 42. understands and loves them. For she is essentially a mother—that is, a woman who can forget herself; who can give without asking to receive; and who, without losing any of the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet live for and in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the well-being of those about her. There is no exaggerated sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfilment of woman's highest duty—the expression of that grand maternal instinct which need not necessarily include the fact of personal maternity, but which, with all women worthy of the name, must find utterance in some line of unselfish action. The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties with cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to the care of a hired servant who is expected to do for so many pounds a year things which the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not find strength to do. When she had children, she attended to them in great part herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies, and the best methods of management. As they grew up she was still the best friend they had—the Providence of their young lives who gave them both care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner of life has forced her to forget herself. When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she had no heart and no time to think of her own appearance, and whether this dressing-gown was more becoming than that: and what did the doctor think of her with her hair pushed back from her face?—and what a fright she must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of watching! The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains faded away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not the finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought compared to the all-absorbing question of whether her child slept after his draught and whether he ate his food with better appetite. And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well as unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste,
  • 43. but decent in form and consistent in tone with her age, it is often remarked that she looks more like the sister than the mother of her girls. This is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not therefore put herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very keystone of beauty. Her hair is thickly streaked with white; the girlish firmness and transparency of her skin have gone; the pearly clearness of her eye is clouded; the slender grace of line is lost—but for all that she is beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside material charm—in that mere beauté du diable of youth—she has gained in character and expression; and by not attempting to simulate the attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her—the attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own beauty—if women would but learn that truth—she is as beautiful now as a matron of fifty, because in harmony with her years, as she was when a maiden of sixteen. This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at times in society—the woman whom all men respect; whom all women envy, and wonder how she does it; and whom all the young adore, and wish they had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness. Standing far apart from this sweet and wholesome idealization is la femme passée of to-day—the reality as we meet with it at balls and fêtes and afternoon At Homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into the world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion; her thinning hair dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow than hair; her flaccid cheeks ruddled; her throat whitened; her bust displayed with unflinching generosity—as if beauty is to be measured by cubic inches; her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished whites; perhaps the pupils dilated by belladonna; perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the moment given by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has a store in her carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no kindly drapery of lace nor of gauze to conceal the breadth of her
  • 44. robust maturity, to soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness— there she stands, the wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who still affects to be a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing but la femme passée—la femme passée et ridicule into the bargain. There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is but a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her abundant experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may be, she flirts and makes love as if an honourable issue were as open to her as to her young daughter; or as if she did not know to what end flirting and making love lead in all ages. If we watch the career of such a woman, we see how, by slow but very sure degrees, she is obliged to lower the standard of her adorers, and to take up at last with men of inferior social position, who are content to buy her patronage by their devotion. To the best men of her own class she can give nothing that they value; so she barters with snobs, who go into the transaction with their eyes open, and take the whole affair as a matter of exchange, and quid pro quo rigidly exacted. Or she does really dazzle some very young and low-born man who is weak as well as ambitious, and who thinks the fugitive regard of a middle- aged woman of high rank something to be proud of and boasted about. That she is as old as his own mother—at this moment selling tapes behind a village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country farm—tells nothing against the association with him; and the woman who began her career of flirtation with the son of a duke ends it with the son of a shopkeeper, having between these two terms spanned all the several degrees of degradation which lie between giving and buying. She cannot help herself; for it is part of the insignia of her artificial youth to have the reputation of a love-affair, or the pretence of one, even if the reality be a mere delusion. When such a woman as this is one of the matrons, and consequently one of the leaders of society, what can we expect from the girls? What worse example could be given to the young? When we see her with her own daughters we feel instinctively that she is the most disastrous adviser they could have; and when in the company of girls or young
  • 45. married women not belonging to her, we doubt whether we ought not to warn their natural guardians against allowing such association, for all that her standing in society is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her. What good in life does this kind of woman do? All her time is taken up, first in trying to make herself look twenty or thirty years younger than she is, and then in trying to make others believe the same. She has neither thought nor energy to spare from this, to her, far more important work than is feeding the hungry or nursing the sick, rescuing the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final cause of her existence seems to be the impetus she has given to a certain branch of trade manufacture—unless we add to this, the corruption of society. For whom, but for her, are the 'little secrets' which are continually being advertised as woman's social salvation—regardless of grammar? The 'eaux noire, brun, et châtain, which dyes the hair any shade in one minute;' the 'kohl for the eyelids;' the 'blanc de perle,' and 'rouge de Lubin'—which does not wash off; the 'bleu pour les veines;' the 'rouge of eight shades,' and 'the sympathetic blush,' which are cynically offered for the use and adoption of our mothers and daughters, find their chief patroness in the femme passée who makes herself up—the middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic struggle against time, and obstinately refusing to grow old in spite of all that nature may say or do. Bad as the Girl of the Period is, this horrible travesty of her vices in the modern matron is even worse. Indeed, were it not for her, the girls would never have gone to such lengths as those to which they have gone; for elder women naturally have immense influence over younger ones, and if mothers were resolutely to set their faces against the follies of the day, daughters would and must give in. As it is, some go even ahead of the young, and, by example on the one hand and rivalry on the other, sow the curse of corruption broadcast where they were meant to have only a pure influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for those who still remain faithful—women who regard themselves as the trustees for humanity and virtue—the world would go to ruin forthwith; but so long as the five righteous are left we have hope and a certain
  • 46. amount of security for the future, when the present disgraceful madness of society shall have passed away.
  • 47. SPOILT WOMEN. Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if subjected to unwholesome conditions. Sometimes the spoiling comes from over-harshness, sometimes from over-indulgence; what we are speaking of to-day is the latter condition—the spoiling which comes from being petted and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves better than everybody else, and living under laws made specially for them. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for the most part there is a tougher fibre in them which resists the flabby influences of flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the morale of the weaker sex; besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows that his adherents criticize though they dare not oppose. A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so that he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way and able to conquer any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain high-handed activity of will about him that does not interfere with his duties in life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant as a woman is—as if he alone of all mankind ought to be exempt from misfortunes and annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his circumstances run always smooth, protected by the care of others from all untoward hitch; as if time and tide, which wait for no one else, are bound to him as humble servants dutifully observant of his wishes. The useful art of finding his level, which he learnt at school and in his youth generally, keeps him from any very weak manifestation of being spoilt; save indeed, when he has been spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an adoring wife and a large circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, to all of whom his smallest wishes are religious obligations and his faintest virtues godly graces, and who vie with each other which of
  • 48. them shall wait upon him most servilely, flatter him most outrageously, coax and coddle him most entirely, and so do him the largest amount of spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and work of masculine life. A man subjected to this insidious injury is simply ruined so far as any real manliness of nature goes. He is made into that sickening creature, 'a sweet being,' as the women call him—a woman's man with æsthetic tastes and a turn for poetry; full of highflown sentiment and morbid sympathies; a man almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of useful ambition in him, but who puts his whole life into love, and who becomes at last emphatically not worth his salt. Bad as it is for men of the world to be kowtowed to by men, it is not so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry which sometimes goes on when one man is the centre of a large family of women, and the only object upon which the natural feminine instinct can expend itself. No greater damage can be done to a man than is done by this kind of domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far master of himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, the sweet and penetrating poison, of woman's tender flattery and loving submission. To a certain extent he holds it so entirely the right thing, because it is natural and instinctive, that it is difficult to draw the line and map out exactly the division between right and wrong, pleasantness and harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and debasing slavishness begins. Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause: over-attention from men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters, with indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up to ruining their young charges with the utmost despatch possible; but this is comparatively a rare form of the disease, and one which a little wholesome matrimonial discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom that a petted daughter becomes a spoilt wife—human affairs having that marvellous power of equation, that inevitable tendency to readjust the balance, which prevents the continuance of a like
  • 49. excess under different forms. Besides, a spoilt daughter generally makes such a supremely unpleasant wife that the husband has no inducement to continue the mistake, and therefore either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition of snubbing, or, if she be aggressive as well as unpleasant, leaves her to fight with her shadows in the best way she can, glad for his own part to escape the strife she will not forego. The spoilt woman is impatient of anything like rivalry. She never has a female friend—certainly not one of her own degree, and not one at all in the true sense of the word. Friendship presupposes equality; and a spoilt woman knows no equality. She has been so long accustomed to consider herself as lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if any one steps in to share her honours and divide her throne. To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, and to pay her the attention due to a charming woman, is to insult our spoilt darling, and to slight her past forgiveness. If there is only one good thing, it must be given to her—the first seat, the softest cushion, the most protected situation; and she looks for the best of all things as if naturally consecrated from her birth to the sunshine of life, and as if the 'cold shade' which may do for others were by no means the portion allotted to her. It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman understand the grace or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she may sometimes be found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience which sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only sometimes. The spoilt woman par excellence understands only her own value, only her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements; and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues belonging to unselfishness, are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in the original, or the squaring of the circle. The spoilt woman, as the wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of sickly children, is a pitiable spectacle. If obliged to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to make an old gown serve when a new one is desired, to sit up all night watching by the sick-bed, to witness the painful
  • 50. details of illness, perhaps of death, to meet hardship face to face and to bend her back to the burden of sorrow, she is at the first absolutely lost. Not the thing to be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the one master idea—not others' needs, but her own pain in supplying them, is the great grief of the moment. Many are the hard lessons set us by life and fate, but the hardest of all is that given to the spoilt woman when she is made to think for others rather than for herself, and is forced by the exigencies of circumstances to sacrifice her own ease for the greater necessities of her kind. All that large part of the true woman's nature which expresses itself in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one she loves. She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and put it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her longest walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the drawing-room. It is not that she cannot do these small offices for herself, but that she likes the feeling of being waited on; and it is not for love, and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of the beloved, but it is for the vanity of being a little somebody for the moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the procedure, that she claims his attention. She would not return that attention. Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords hand and foot, and who place their highest honour in their lowliest service, the spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of the natural grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for gratitude. This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the demi-monde of the higher class, and among women who are of the demi-monde by nature. The respect they cannot command by their virtues they demand in the simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are more tenacious of the outward forms of deference than those who have lost their claim to the vital reality. It is very striking to see the
  • 51. difference between the women of this type, the petites maîtresses who require the utmost attention and almost servility from man, and the noble dignity of service which the pure woman can afford to give —which she finds indeed, that it belongs to the very purity and nobleness of her womanhood to give. It is the old story of the ill- assured position which is afraid of its own weakness, and the security which can afford to descend—the rule holding good for other things besides mere social place. Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the changeableness and excitability of her temper. All suavity and gentleness and delightful gaiety and perfect manners when everything goes right, she startles you by her outburst of petulance when the first cross comes. If no man is a hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of the drawing-room, upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go through spiritual exercises to which walking among burning ploughshares is easy-going. A length of lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that crumples one of the myriad rose-leaves on which she lies, and the spoilt woman raves as much as if each particular leaf had become suddenly a bunch of thorns. If a dove were to be transformed to a hawk the change would not be more complete, more startling, than that which occurs when the spoilt woman of well-bred company manners puts off her mask to her maid, and shows her temper over trifles. Whoever else may suffer the grievances of life, she cannot understand that she also must be at times one of the sufferers with the rest; and if by chance the bad moment comes, the person accompanying it has a hard time of it. There are spoilt women also who have their peculiar exercises in thought and opinion, and who cannot suffer that any one should think differently from themselves, or find those things sacred which to them are accursed. They will hear nothing but what is in harmony with themselves; and they take it as a personal insult when men or women attempt to reason with them, or even hold their own without
  • 52. flinching. This kind is to be found specially among the more intellectual of a family or a circle—women who are pronounced clever by their friends, and who have been so long accustomed to think themselves clever that they have become spoilt mentally as others are personally, and fancy that minds and thoughts must follow in their direction, just as eyes and hands must follow and attend their sisters. The spoilt woman of the mental kind is a horrid nuisance generally. She is greatly given to large discourse. But discourse of a kind that leans all to one side, and that denies the right of any one to criticize, doubt, or contradict, is an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not pleasant to live.
  • 53. DOVECOTS. Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are not still left to keep the sources of society sweet and wholesome. When corruption has gone through the whole mass and all classes are bad alike, everything comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of national life; but while some are left pure and unspotted, we are not quite undone, and we may reasonably hope for better days in the future. In the midst of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her slang and her boldness—of the fashionable woman, with her denial of duty and her madness for pleasure—we come every now and then upon a group of good girls of the real old English type; the faithful few growing up silently among us, but none the less valuable because they are silent and make no public display; doves who are content with life as they have it in the dovecot, and have no desire to be either eagles dwelling on romantic heights, or peacocks displaying their pride in sunny courts. We find these faithful few in town and country alike; but they are rifest in the country, where there is less temptation to go wrong than there is in the large towns, and where life is simpler and the moral tone undeniably higher. The leading feature of these girls is their love of home and of their own family, and their power of making occupation and happiness out of apparently meagre materials. If they are the elders, they find amusement and interest in their little brothers and sisters, whom they consider immensely funny and to whom they are as much girl- mothers as sisters; if they are the youngers, they idolize their baby nephews and nieces. For there is always a baby going on somewhere about these houses—babies being the great excitement of home-life, and the antiseptic element among women which keeps everything else pure. They are passionately attached to papa and mamma, whom they think the very king and queen of humanity, yet whom they do not call by even endearing slang names. It has never
  • 54. occurred to them to criticize them as ordinary mortals; and as they have not been in the way of learning the prevailing accent of disrespect, they have not shaken off that almost religious veneration for their parents which all young people naturally feel, if they have been well brought up and are not corrupted. The yoke in most middle-class country-houses is one fitting very loosely round all necks; and as they have all the freedom they desire or could use, the girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are content to live in peace under such restraints as they have. They adore their elder brothers who are from home just beginning the great battle of life for themselves, and confidently believe them to be the finest fellows going, and the future great men of the day if only they care to put out those splendid talents of theirs, and take the trouble of plucking the prizes within their reach. They may have a slight reservation perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But they keep their mental architecture a profound secret from every one, and do not suffer it to grow into too solid a structure unless it has some surer foundation than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving, they are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy and natural and quietly busy for unwholesome dreams. If one of them marries, they all unite in loving the man who comes in among them. He is adopted as one of themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing sisters who pet him as their brother—with just that subtle little difference in their petting, in so much as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so has the charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of naughtiness. But this kind of thing is about the most dangerous to a man's moral nature that can befall him. Though pretty to see and undeniably pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent in every way, still, nothing enervates him so much as this idolatrous submission of a large family of women. In a widow's house, where there are many daughters and no sons, and where the man who marries one marries the whole family and is worshipped accordingly, the danger is of course increased tenfold; but if there are brothers and a father, the sister's husband, though affectionately cooed over,
  • 55. is not made quite such a fuss with, and the association is all the less hurtful in consequence. These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though it is a quiet one, and without any spasmodic events or tremendous cataclysms. They go a great deal among the village poor, and they teach at the Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and clothing-clubs and the like, and learn to get interested in their humbler friends, who after all are Christian sisters. They read their romances in real life instead of in three-volume novels, and study human nature as it is—in the rough certainly, but perhaps in more genuine form than if they learnt it only in what is called society. Then they have their pleasures, though they are of an unexciting kind and what fast girls would call awfully slow. They have their horses and their croquet parties, their lawn tennis and their archery meetings; they have batches of new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's—and they know the value of both; they go out to tea, and sometimes to dinner, in the neighbourhood; and they enjoy the rare county balls with a zest unknown to London girls who are out every night in the week. They have their village flower-shows, which the great families patronize in a free-and-easy kind of way, and which give occupation for weeks before and subject for talk for weeks after; their school feasts, where the pet parson of the district comes out with his best anecdotes, and makes mild jokes at a long distance from Sydney Smith; their periodical missionary meetings, where they have great guns from London, and where they hear unctuous stories about the saintliness of converted cannibals, and are required to believe in the power of change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle; they have their friends to stay with them—school-girl friends—with whom they exchange deep confidences, and go back over the old days—so old to their youth!—their brothers come down in the summer, and their brothers' friends come with them, and do a little spooning in the shrubbery. But there is more spooning done at picnics than anywhere else; and more offers are made there under the shadow of the old ruin, or in the quiet leafy nook by the river side, than at any other gathering time of the country. And as we are all to a
  • 56. certain extent what we are made by our environment, the doves take to these pleasures quite kindly and gratefully, as being the only ones known to them, and enjoy themselves in a simplicity of circumstances which would give no pleasure at all to girls accustomed to more highly-spiced entertainments. Doves know very little of evil. They are not in the way of learning it; and they do not care to learn it. The few villagers who are supposed to lead ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and carefully avoided without being critically studied. When the railway is to be carried past their quiet nest, there is an immense excitement as the report goes that a knot of strange men have been seen scattering themselves over the fields with their little white flags and theodolites, their measuring lines and levels. But when the army of navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to consternation, and a general sense of evil to come advancing ruthlessly towards them. The clergy of the district organize special services, and the scared doves keep religiously away from the place where the navvies are hutted. They think them little better than the savages about whom the Deputation tell them once or twice a year; and they create almost as much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They represent the lawless forces of the world and the unknown sins of strong men; and the wildest story about them is not too wild to be believed. The railway altogether is a great offence to the neighbourhood, and the line is assumed to destroy the whole scenic beauty of the place. There are lamentations over the cockneys it will bring down; over the high prices it will create, the immorality it will cause. Only the sons who are out in the world and have learnt how life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate keeping pace with the times; and a few of the stronger minded of the sisters listen to them with a timid admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think there may be two sides to the question after all. When the dashing captain and his fast wife suddenly appear in the village—as often happens in these remote districts—the doves are in a state of great moral tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs. Highflyer's costume and complexion, and think her manners odd and doubtful; her slang
  • 57. shocks them; and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so loudly and laughing so shrilly with that horrid-looking man in a green cutaway, they feel as fluttered as their namesakes when a hawk is hovering over the farmyard. The dashing captain, who does not use a prayer-book at church, who stares at all the girls so rudely, and who has even been seen to wink at some of the prettier cottage girls, and his handsome wife with her equivocal complexion and pronounced fashions, who makes eyes at the curate, are never heartily adopted by the local magnates, though vouched for by some far-away backer; and the doves always feel them to be strange bodies among them, and out of their rightful element somehow. If things go quietly without an explosion, well and good; but if the truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a London detective, and the Highflyers are found to be no better than they should be, the consternation and half-awed wonderment at the existence of so much effrontery and villany in their atmosphere create an impression which no time effaces. The first clash of innocence with evil is an event in the life of the innocent the effect of which nothing ever destroys. The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the doves are somewhat moped; but even then they have the church to decorate, and the sentiment of Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the family too, return to the old hearth while they can; and as the great joy of the dovecot lies in the family union that is kept up, and in the family love which is so strong, the visits of those who no longer live at home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as the physical sunshine. But they do not all assemble. For many of the doves marry men whose work lies abroad; these quiet country- houses being the favourite matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists and Anglo-Indians. So that some are always absent whose healths are drunk in the traditional punch, while eyes grow moist as the names are given. Doves are not disinclined to marry men who have to go abroad, for all the passionate family love common to them. Travel is a golden dream to them in their still homes; but travel properly companioned. For even the most adventurous among them
  • 58. are not independent, as we mean when we speak of independence in women. They are essentially home-girls, family-girls, doves who cannot exist without a dovecot, however humble. The family is everything to them; and they are utterly unfit for the solitude which so many of our self-supporting women can accept quite resignedly. Not that they are necessarily useless even as breadwinners. They could work, if pushed to it; but it must be in a quiet womanly way, with the mother, the sister, the husband as the helper—with the home as the place of rest and the refuge. Their whole lines are laid in love and quietness; not by any means in inaction, but all centred within the home circle. If they marry, they find the love of their husband enough for them, and have no desire for other men's admiration. Their babies are all the world to them, and they do not think maternity an infliction, as so many of the miserably fashionable think it. They like the occupation of housekeeping, and feel pride in their fine linen and clean service, in their well-ordered table and neatly-balanced accounts. They are kind to their servants, who generally come from the old home, and whose families they therefore know; but they keep up a certain dignity and tone of superiority towards them in the midst of all their kindness, which very few town-bred mistresses can keep to town-bred maids. They have always been the aristocracy in their native place; and they carry through life the ineffaceable stamp which being 'the best' gives. Doves are essentially mild and gentle women; not queens of society even when they are pretty, because not caring for social success and therefore not laying themselves out for it; for if they please at home that is all they care for, holding love before admiration, and the esteem of one higher than the praise of many. If a fault is to be found with them it is that they have not perhaps quite enough salt for the general taste, used as it is to such highly-seasoned social food; but do we really want our women to have so very much character? Do not our splendid passionate creatures lead madly wretched lives and make miserably uncomfortable homes? and are not our glorious heroines better in pictures and in fiction than seated
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