The greatest fault that thinking men find with this sort of girl is, that she becomes sillier every day that she lives.  I have heard women complain of the degeneracy of the boys who seek their daughters in marriage; but when I look at the many girls of this type I am tempted to say, “Well, madam, who but a degenerate would care to marry your daughter?”

Men claim that it is difficult to maintain their ideals in regard to women, in the face of such selfishness, crudeness, bad manners, and jealousies as exist between young girls of this sort.  Of course, they who have become belles by reason of their lovely faces never know that the thinking class of young men criticise them adversely, and they would not care if they did.  There are still many men who do admire and who will fall in love with them, and the others are not missed.

We must not blame them too severely for rejoicing in their loveliness.  It might be a hard struggle for the rest of us not to do the same if we had their beauty.

Men often wonder why girls’ friendships are so hollow.  They wonder why we are so ungenerous to each other.  “So hateful,” we call it.  Hateful is not a man’s word.  It is a woman’s; and trust a woman to know exactly what it means.

Well, the truth of it is that men are at the bottom of a great deal of it.  Girls seldom quarrel with each other except over some man, and, while they intend to be loyal to each other, they cannot seem to manage it if there is a man in the case.

Most girls have two natures.  One she shows to men; the other to other girls.  What we know of one is the way she droops and is so openly bored by other girls that it is quite a blow to our vanity to be obliged to be with her.  We recognize the other at the approach of a man, even if we cannot see him, by the changes in the girl’s face.  She straightens herself, puts a hand on each side of her waist, and pushes her belt down lower, moistens her lips, a sparkle comes into her eyes, she touches her back hair, and runs a finger under the edge of her veil.  Then she smiles—­such a smile as the other girls have not been able to win from her in three hours.

These girls are very clever sometimes—­even these little, soft, kitteny girls, who do not know anything about books, who never read, who never study, and are popularly called empty-headed even by the very men who make love to them.  These girls are keen beyond words to express in their intuitive knowledge of human nature and the differentiation between man nature and woman nature.  They are capable of using the outward and apparent motives of humanity for an effect, and secretly of plying the subtlest and most occult.

It is difficult to designate their exact methods, and dangerous to exploit them, for you immediately lay yourself open to the suspicion of being capable of the same double-dealing yourself, or of its being beneath your dignity to accuse any one of such duplicity; and yet there are the causes and there are the results.  You can shut your eyes to them if you wish.