hich they ought
not to make on any woman; above all, never in girlish flightiness, or,
worse still, in order to boast of the number of offers they have
received, to flirt or trifle in any way with a man's affections; but to
remember that to every man they have to make a woman only the other name
for truth and constancy. God only knows the number of young men who have
received their first downward bent from what to a young girl, in the
wilfulness of her high spirits and her ignorance of life, has been only
a bit of fun, but which to the young man has been the first fatal break
in his faith in woman--that faith which in his soul dwells so hard by
his faith in the Divine that in making shipwreck of the one is only too
likely to make shipwreck of the other.

As to the mothers who send out their young girls into society the
victims of their fashionable dressmakers, to be a fountain, not of high,
pure thoughts to young men, but a spring of low temptations and impure
suggestions, I do not blame the young girls here; but surely the
severest blame is due to the criminal folly, or worse, of their mothers,
who must know what the consequences of immodest dressing necessarily are
to the inflammable mind of youth.

But that that unlovely phenomenon "the girl of the period," is also
deeply to blame for the lowered traditions of English society, and
consequently of English manhood, I have only too sorrowfully to
acknowledge. I remember Mrs. Herbert of Vauxhall telling a very
fashionable audience how on one occasion she had to rebuke a young man
moving in the first London society for using some contemptuous
expression with regard to women, and was led to appeal very earnestly to
him to reverence all women for his mother's sake. He turned upon her
with a sort of divine rage and said: "I long to reverence women, but the
girls I meet with in society won't let me. They like me to make free
with them; they like me to talk to them about doubtful subjects, and
they make me"--and he ground his teeth as he said it--"what I just hate
myself for being." Alas! alas! can sadder words knell in a woman's ears
than these?

But side by side with this desecrating womanhood there rises up before
me the vision of a young girl, not English, nor American, but
French--now a mature woman, with girls and boys of her own, but who in
her young days was the very embodiment of all that I have been urging
that our girls might become to their brothers. She was a d