What I would, therefore, teach the girls is this:  that they have got to mother the boys, that they are the guardians of all that is best and highest in them, of all that makes for the chivalrous American gentleman, and that their womanhood should therefore be to them a fountain of fine manners, of high thoughts, and noble actions.  I would rub into their very bones, if I could, the old saw I have already quoted:  “A man is what a woman makes him”; that if there were more high womanhood there would be less low manhood; and that if the boys are rude and rough and slangy, and loutish in their manner to women, the blame lies with their sisters who, in their foolish fondness and indulgence, or in their boyish camaraderie, have allowed them to slouch up into a slovenly manhood.  The man at most is the fine prose of life, but the woman ought to be its poetry and inspiration.  It is her hand that sets its key, whether

    “To feed the high tradition of the world,”

or add to its low discords.  Surely Ruskin’s noble words apply here:  “It is the type of an eternal truth that the soul’s armor is never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it; and it is only when she has braced it loosely that the honor of manhood fails”; or those other still stronger and nobler words of Frederick Robertson’s:  “There are two rocks in a man’s life on which he must either anchor or split:  God and Woman.”

And could we not appeal to our girls to make their womanhood a rock which bears a light to all in peril on the rough sea of life—­a light to save from moral shipwreck and lead to the safe haven beneath the Rock of Ages?  Surely we might appeal to them, in the name of their own brothers and others with whom they are intimately thrown, to work out these higher possibilities of their own womanhood; not to lower it by picking up slang words from their brothers—­a woman ought to be above coarsening and vulgarizing God’s great gift of speech—­not to engage in games or romps that involve a rude rough-and-tumble with boys, which may develop a healthy hoyden, but is utterly destructive of the gracious dignity of the true woman; not to adopt fast ways of either dress or bearing which lead to young men making remarks behind their backs which they ought not to make on any woman; above all, never in girlish flightiness, or, worse still, in order to boast of the number of offers they have received, to flirt or trifle in any way with a man’s affections; but to remember that to every man they have to make a woman only the other name for truth and constancy.  God only knows the number of young men who have received their first downward bent from what to a young girl, in the wilfulness of her high spirits and her ignorance of life, has been only a bit of fun, but which to the young man has been the first fatal break in his faith in woman—­that faith which in his soul dwells so hard by his faith in the Divine that in making shipwreck of the one is only too likely to make shipwreck of the other.