ard.

I knew a very clever girl, who had the misfortune to look at fourteen as
if she were twenty. At home, she was the shyest and most awkward of
creatures; away from her mother and sisters, she was self-possessed and
charming. She said to me, once, "Oh! I have such a splendid time away from
home. I'm so tall, everybody thinks I am grown up, and everybody is civil
to me."

I know, also, a man of superb physique, charming temperament, and uncommon
talent, who is to this day--and he is twenty-five years old--nervous and
ill at ease in talking with strangers, in the presence of his own family.
He hesitates, stammers, and never does justice to his thoughts. He says
that he believes he shall never be free from this distress; he cannot
escape from the recollections of the years between fourteen and twenty,
during which he was so systematically snubbed that his mother's parlor was
to him worse than the chambers of the Inquisition. He knows that he is now
sure of courteous treatment; that his friends are all proud of him; but
the old cloud will never entirely disappear. Something has been lost which
can never be regained. And the loss is not his alone, it is theirs too;
they are all poorer for life, by reason of the unkind days which are gone.

This, then, is the explanation of the awkward age. I am not afraid of any
dissent from my definition of the source whence its misery springs.
Everybody's consciousness bears witness. Everybody knows, in the bottom of
his heart, that, however much may be said about the change of voice, the
thinness of cheeks, the sharpness of arms, the sudden length in legs and
lack of length in trousers and frocks,--all these had nothing to do with
the real misery. The real misery was simply and solely the horrible
feeling of not belonging anywhere; not knowing what a moment might bring
forth in the way of treatment from others; never being sure which impulse
it would be safer to follow, to retreat or to advance, to speak or to be
silent, and often overwhelmed with unspeakable mortification at the rebuff
of the one or the censure of the other. Oh! how dreadful it all was! How
dreadful it all is, even to remember! It would be malicious even to refer
to it, except to point out the cure.

The cure is plain. It needs no experiment to test it. Merely to mention it
ought to be enough. If human beings are so awkward at this unhappy age,
and so unhappy at this awkward age, simply because they do not know
whe