Elopements sometimes take place and are called the boda Americana, or American marriage.  However, they have the advantage of us in one kind of elopement—­that of the widow.  Runaway marriages between widows and old bachelors are not a common feature of American life, but they seem to constitute the most frequent form of elopement here.  Forced marriages occur in spite of the restrictions put around young girls.  They cause a ten days’ hubbub, winks, nods, and much giggling behind fans.  But no social punishment and ostracism of the girl follows as in our own country.  So long as the marriage is accomplished, the Filipinos seem to feel that the fact of its being a little late need disturb no one.  But if, as sometimes happens, a girl is led astray by a married man, then disgrace and punishment are her lot.  I recall a circumstance where a young girl under a cloud left her native town, never to appear there again.  But less than three months after her banishment, her seducer was an honored guest, sitting at the right hand of her brother, in the brother’s own house.  Apparently the best of feeling prevailed over a matter that with us could never have been forgiven, though bloodshed might perhaps have been averted.

In my eight years in those Islands I have met among the upper classes but one young girl whose conduct offered reason to men to take her lightly.  In a pretty, childish way, Filipino girls are coquettes, but they are not flirts.  Their conception of marriage and of their duty to their own husbands and their children is a high and noble one.  Nevertheless, with innately good and pure instincts, they cannot take half as good care of themselves as can the American girl who is more indiscreet, who knows much less of the matters pertaining to love and sex.  The latter has an infinite advantage over her dusky sister in the prudery of speech which is the outwork in a line of fortifications in which a girl’s tenacity to her own ideal of chastity must be the final bulwark, A frankness of speech prevails in the Philippines with regard to matters about which we are frank under necessity, but which, as far as possible, we slide into the background.  Stories are told in the presence of young girls, and jokes are interchanged, of more than questionable nature according to our standards.  Our prudery of speech is the natural result of the liberty permitted to women.  When the protection of an older woman or of a male relative is done away with, and a girl is permitted to go about quite unattended, the best and the surest protection that she can have is the kind of modesty that takes fright at even a bare mention, a bare allusion, to certain ordinarily ignored facts of life.

The result of general freedom of speech and the process of safeguarding a girl from its results is to make a Filipino girl regard her virtue as something foreign to herself, a property to be guarded by her relatives.  If, through negligence or ignorance on the part of her proper guardians, she is exposed to temptation, she feels herself free from responsibility in succumbing.  Such a view of life puts a young girl at a great disadvantage with men, especially with men so generally unscrupulous as Filipinos,