old beau loves with an
hysterical fervor that requires four adjectives to every noun to
properly describe.

It is well, dear ladies, for us old sinners that you study only books.
Did you read mankind, you would know that the lad's shy stammering tells
a truer tale than our bold eloquence. A boy's love comes from a full
heart; a man's is more often the result of a full stomach. Indeed, a
man's sluggish current may not be called love, compared with the rushing
fountain that wells up when a boy's heart is struck with the heavenly
rod. If you would taste love, drink of the pure stream that youth pours
out at your feet. Do not wait till it has become a muddy river before
you stoop to catch its waves.

Or is it that you like its bitter flavor--that the clear, limpid water
is insipid to your palate and that the pollution of its after-course
gives it a relish to your lips? Must we believe those who tell us that a
hand foul with the filth of a shameful life is the only one a young girl
cares to be caressed by?

That is the teaching that is bawled out day by day from between those
yellow covers. Do they ever pause to think, I wonder, those devil's
ladyhelps, what mischief they are doing crawling about God's garden, and
telling childish Eves and silly Adams that sin is sweet and that decency
is ridiculous and vulgar? How many an innocent girl do they not degrade
into an evil-minded woman? To how many a weak lad do they not point out
the dirty by-path as the shortest cut to a maiden's heart? It is not as
if they wrote of life as it really is. Speak truth, and right will take
care of itself. But their pictures are coarse daubs painted from the
sickly fancies of their own diseased imagination.

We want to think of women not--as their own sex would show them--as
Lorleis luring us to destruction, but as good angels beckoning us
upward. They have more power for good or evil than they dream of. It is
just at the very age when a man's character is forming that he tumbles
into love, and then the lass he loves has the making or marring of him.
Unconsciously he molds himself to what she would have him, good or bad.
I am sorry to have to be ungallant enough to say that I do not think
they always use their influence for the best. Too often the female world
is bounded hard and fast within the limits of the commonplace. Their
ideal hero is a prince of littleness, and to become that many a powerful
mind, enchanted by love, is "lost to life a