others tending their little children. For
that matter a little girl is only a woman in miniature. A young boy has
none, or very few, of the characteristics of a man; but a young girl
has, at ten years of age, all the characteristics of a woman.

I have known little girls of ten and twelve who were perfect flirts,
little coquettes, careful housekeepers, and, toward their dolls, most
devoted mothers. I remember one who sternly refused to accompany us to a
most tempting party, because her doll had a cold and she felt she must
stay at home to nurse it. She was absolutely serious over it, and found
even great delight in remaining at home all the time by the bedside of
her doll. I remember another who had spent the whole morning cleaning
her doll's house from top to bottom. When it was all over she drew a
great sigh of relief. 'At last,' she said, 'the house is clean; that's
comfort, anyway.' A good, dutiful, bourgeois housewife would not have
expressed herself otherwise. Have you not, some of you, even seen little
girls give medicines to their dolls, rock them to sleep, put them to
bed, tuck them in most carefully, and see that the bedclothes did not
choke them and cause them to have nightmares? I have, many times.

A man very often shows inclinations, tastes, and all sorts of
characteristic traits which his parents never discovered in him when he
was a young boy; but a woman of thirty is what she was when she was ten,
only a little more so. A bad boy may become a very good man, and I have
known very good boys become very bad men; but a caressing, loving little
girl will surely make a loving wife and a tender mother; a cold and
uncaressing little girl will become a heartless woman, an indifferent
wife and mother. A boy is a boy! a little girl is a little woman.

This is so true that women, many women at all events, who treated their
dolls as if they were children, treat their children as if they were
dolls. It is the survival of the little girl in the woman. I have known
women allow the hair of their boys to fall down their backs in long
curls because they looked prettier and more like dolls, although they
must have known that the sap of their young bodies was feeding hair at
the expense of other far more important parts of their anatomy. When you
see a woman most attentive to her baby, insisting on washing it,
dressing it herself, you say: 'She is a most dutiful mother; she would
trust no one but herself to attend her litt