And if all this is true of ordinary friendship—­if it calls for so much high principle and self-denial and prayer—­what of love, “the perfection of friendship”?  It is usually either ignored or joked about.  The jokes are edged tools always in bad taste and often dangerous, but it is a pity the subject should be ignored.  When it becomes a personal question the girl is sure to be too excited or irritable to take advice, so that there is something to be said for that discussion of “love in the abstract,” which Sydney Smith overheard at a Scotch ball.  It is surely better, in forming her standard and opinion on this most important of all points, that a girl should have the help of her mother and older friends.  Girls do not go to their mothers as they might, because they wait till they are sore and conscious and resentful.  Most girls would rather be married, and quite right too,—­in no other state of life will they find such thorough discipline and chastening!—­it is the only life which makes a true and perfect woman.  But if they wish it, let them not be so untidy, so fidgety, so domineering, that no man in his senses would put up with them!  And if she be a “leisured girl” with no duty calling her from home (or very possibly many duties calling her to remain at home), let her think, not twice, but many times, before a wish for independence and Bohemianism (which she translates into “Art”) leads her into grooves of life where she is very unlikely to meet the sort of man who can give her the home and the surroundings to which she is accustomed.  Harriet Byron’s despair and ecstasy about Sir Charles have passed away, but girls still dream of heroes (not always so heroic as Sir Charles).  Their dreams cannot fail to be coloured by the novels they read and the poetry they dwell on; do they always realize the responsibility of keeping good company?  Read love-stories, by all means, but let them be noble ones, such as show you, Molly Gibson, Mary Colet, Romola, Di Vernon, Margaret Hale, Shirley, Anne Elliot, The Angel in the House, The Gardener’s Daughter, The Miller’s Daughter, Sweet Susan Winstanley, and Beatrice.  It is impossible to dwell on the mere passionate emotion of second-rate novels and sensuous poetry, without wiping some possibility of nobleness out of your own life.  Every influence which you allow to pass through your mind colours it, but most of all, those which appeal to your feelings.  You take pains to strengthen your minds, but you let your feelings come up as wheat or tares according to chance; and yet the unruly wills and affections of women need more discipline than their minds.

Perhaps the individual girl feels commonplace and of small account.  Why should she restrain her love of fun, her Tomboyism, her tendency to flirtation?  She is no heroine!  But, let her be as commonplace as possible, she will represent Woman to the man who is in love with her, as surely as Beatrice represented it to Dante.

Every woman, married or single, alters the opinion of some man about women.  Even a careless man judges a girl in a way that she, with her head full of nonsense, probably never dreams of;—­he has a standard for her, though he has none for himself.