When girls in good circumstances become infected with the microbe of violent exercise and insist upon walking many miles a day, besides indulging for hours in games which permit no rest, they look like hags.  Temporarily, of course.  When they recover their common sense they recover their looks, for it is in their power to relax and recuperate.  Men will walk twenty miles, take a cold shower, a good meal, a night’s rest, and look as well as ever the next day—­or at the end of the walk, for that matter.  They can afford the waste.  Women cannot.  If women succeed in achieving hard unyielding muscles in the wrong place they suffer atrociously in childbirth; for Nature, who is as old-fashioned and inhospitable to modern ideas as a Tory statesman, takes a vicious pleasure in punishing one sex every time it succeeds in approaching the peculiar level of the other, or which diverges from the normal in any way.  Note how many artists, who are nine-tenths temperament and one-tenth male, suffer; not only because they are beset with every sort of weakness that affects their social status, but because the struggle with life is too much for them unless they have real men behind them until their output is accepted by the public, and themselves with it.

Some day Society will be civilized enough to recognize the limitations and the helplessness of those who are artists first and men afterwards.  But meanwhile we can only rely upon the sympathy and the understanding of the individual.

Far be it from me to advise that girls refrain from doing their part in the general work of the home, if servants are out of the question; that won’t hurt them; but if some one must go out and support the family it would better be the mother or the maiden aunt.

Better still, a husband, if marriage is their goal and children the secret desire of their hearts.

If girls are so constituted mentally that they long for the independent life, self-support, self-expression, they will have it and without any advice from the worldly-wise; it is as driving an impulse as the reproductive instinct in those who are more liberally sexed.  And these last are still in the majority, no doubt of that.  Therefore, far better they marry and have children in their youth.  They, above all, are the women whose support and protection is the natural duty of man, and while it is one of life’s misfortunes for a girl to marry simply to escape life’s burdens, without love and without the desire for children, it is by far the lesser evil to have the consolation of home and children in the general barrenness of life than to slave all day at an uncongenial task and go “home” to a hall bedroom.