I am sure that the one way to train young people out of the miseries of shyness is for older people never to snub them in public, or make them appear in the light of a fool.  Such snubs fall plentifully and naturally from contemporaries.  An elder person is quite within his rights in inflicting a grave and serious remonstrance in private.  I do not believe that young people ever resent that, if at the same time they are allowed to defend themselves and state their case.  But a merciless elder who inflicts a public mortification is terribly unassailable and impregnable.  For the shy person, who is desperately anxious to bear a sympathetic part, is quite incapable of retort; and that is why such assaults are unpardonable, because they are the merest bullying.

The nicest people that I have known in life have been the people of kindly and sensible natures, who have been thoroughly spoilt as children, encouraged to talk, led to expect not only toleration, but active kindness and sympathy from all.  The worst of it is that such kindness is generally reserved for pretty and engaging children, and it is the awkward, unpleasing, ungainly child who gets the slaps in public.  But, as in Tennyson-Turner’s pretty poem of “Letty’s Globe,” a child’s hand should be “welcome at all frontiers.”  Only deliberate rudeness and insolence on the part of children should be publicly rebuked; and as a matter of fact both rudeness and insolence are far oftener the result of shyness than is easily supposed.

After the shyness of adolescence there often follows a further stage.  The shy person has learnt a certain wisdom; he becomes aware how easily he detects pretentiousness in other people, and realises that there is nothing to be gained by claiming a width of experience which he does not possess, and that the being unmasked is even more painful than feeling deficient and ill-equipped.  Then too he learns to suspect that when he has tried to be impressive, he has often only succeeded in being priggish; and the result is that he falls into a kind of speechlessness, comforting himself, as he sits mute and awkward, unduly elongated, and with unaccountable projections of limb and feature, that if only other people were a little less self-absorbed, had the gift of perceiving hidden worth and real character, and could pierce a little below the surface, they would realise what reserves of force and tenderness lay beneath the heavy shapelessness of which he is still conscious.  Then is the time for the shy person to apply himself to social gymnastics.  He is not required to be voluble; but if he will practise bearing a hand, seeing what other people need and like, carrying on their line of thought, constructing small conversational bridges, asking the right questions, perhaps simulating an interest in the pursuits of others which he does not naturally feel, he may unloose the burden from his back.  Then is the time to practise a sympathetic smile, or better still to allow