will have helped to raise his
idea of what a woman should be.

Women have a great deal to answer for as regards men, and every girl
should do her best to be on the right side and to help a man to be at his
best, by showing that she thinks silliness and vulgar chaff objectionable.
Every girl sets the tone of those she talks with, for every one's
conscience responds to the tacit appeal of a nice-minded girl's dislike of
these things. If you do not respond, it checks such talk wonderfully.

Boys are sometimes told that they must swim with the stream at school and
join in bad talk because "everybody does it," but the nice boy stands out
and does not, and helps weaker ones thereby.

Girls have a much smaller temptation in that way--more to silliness than
to actual wrong; but your tone--in these matters that I speak of--helps
your brothers in their battles with downright wrong. Every boy who knows
his sister's standard is very high, is helped far more than he is
conscious of, by her influence,--and far more than she ever knows, for she
does not know all his temptations.

Women have been trained to nice-mindedness by centuries of public
opinion--they have always been admired for it, and blamed if they lack it;
while men have not been so trained; therefore women have a special power
of helping men, who are, consequently, not likely to be born so particular
about these things as women are.

Always feel responsible for what you laugh at: very often people say
things tentatively to see if you will laugh: you help to fix their
standard by the way you take it, and you often throw your weight into the
wrong scale because you are afraid of seeming priggish. A man's sense of
humour is different from a woman's; when you go into the world you must be
careful not to laugh just because a man makes a joke, until you are quite
sure that it is one to laugh at. Perhaps your host makes it, and his wife
looks a trifle grave: then be quick to take your cue from her and to
notice what nice women think nice for a woman.

Very often in talking to girls and preparing them for life, the whole
question of flirtation and nonsense is left out--there is not even as much
said as in Mrs. Blackett's village, where the clergyman's wife put every
girl through a special catechism before she left to go to service, part of
which was, "Lads, Sally?" The correct answer briskly given by Sally was,
"Have naught to do with them--but if they _will_, tell mother."