I know many girls who are still seeing and hearing unintelligently, and have not begun to assimilate knowledge, even at twenty-five.  I know others of twenty, who have assimilated so well that they will never be under twenty-five.  But it is a literal fact, and this statement I am willing to live up to, that the majority of girls must have lived through their first youth before a thinking person can take any comfort with them.

I am sure Samuel Johnson had this in mind when he said:  “’Tis a terrible thing that we cannot wish young ladies well without wishing them to become old women.”  Or possibly the exclamation was wrung from him after an attempt to talk to one of them.  Many brave men, who would stop a runaway horse, or who would dare to look for burglars under the bed, quail utterly before the prospect of talking to a young girl who frankly says, “I don’t think.”

How can those girls, who give evidence of no more thought than is evinced by their namby-pamby chatter, call their existence living?  They mistake pertness for wit; audacity for cleverness; disrespect to old age for independence; and general bad manners for individuality.  Has nobody ever trained these girls to think?  What kind of schools do they attend?  Who has spoiled them by flattery, until they are little peacocks to whom a mirror is an irresistible temptation?

Why do unthinking parents supply them with money, and never ask how they spend it?  How does it come that if you want to find great numbers of them together you go to Huyler’s instead of to Brentano’s?  What kind of women will these girls make, to whom a wrinkle in their waist is of more moment than their soul’s salvation?

I often wonder what kind of mothers these girls have.  Surely there can be no family conversation where they live.  Surely they never hear the great questions of the day discussed at the dinner-table.  From the number of hours they spend upon the street, I often am tempted to say, what the poor, tired woman, who stood for miles in the street-car, said to her fellow-passengers, “Have none of yez homes?”

Poor, empty-pated little creatures!  Poor lovely little clothes-racks, who occasionally organize a concert for newsboys whose lives are busier and more useful than their own!  A Street Waifs’ Benefit for Street Waifs!

If the crude young person who stands with such eager feet where the brook and river meet that she has wetted her pretty shoon in her haste to be in the society of men could only have the wit to sing: 

 “O wad some power the giftie gie us,
  To see oursels as others see us,”

she might discover strange points of resemblance between herself and a very young baby.

In the earliest days of earthly existence a baby is in a jelly-fish state, from which no one can say what he will emerge.  His brain is a sponge.  He receives everything and gives nothing.  He is pretty to look at, and seems made for nothing but love.  He coos and gurgles, he seldom does anything more intelligent than to smile, and he prefers men to women.