nding money on dress and ornament--a
taste very little different from the instinct which causes savages to
adorn their half-naked bodies with feathers, beads and shells--is to be
satisfied when women's wages fall? There would seem to be nothing too
useless or too expensive for girls to buy. Work has failed in teaching
them the simple lesson that not only is it wrong to waste money, but it
is wrong to waste labor for the gratification of whims. We are having
the need for economy preached and shouted at us from every quarter.
Surely it is right to think about this wild spending on adornment, and
give at least a few glances to the future.

What is likely to happen now when the full years of war change to empty
years of peace? No longer able to spend in the way to which their high
wages have made them accustomed, girls will seek to get presents from
men; they will want excitement and the dress and pleasures to satisfy
that need, also to hold the envy of their friends. This must lead to
prostitution. The weaker sort of girl will prefer to sell her body
rather than go back to a humdrum life of drudgery in back-kitchens. It
is well that we should remember that, if women are to suffer through
men's passions, men will suffer no less from women's greed.

I desire to be quite fair. Almost all girls, I think, are better looking
since 1914, more confident, more brightly attractive; sometimes they are
deliriously gay, more often cheaply aggressive and noisy. Yet, at other
times, they seem deadened and slow in response. None of them are shy.
Their eyes say things that are hard to read; they exhibit no end of
energy, but there is a curious kind of contradiction--a confusion and
difficult defiance, with much nervous weakness. I can find no steadfast
happiness.

I would ask my readers, as often I have asked myself, a question: Have
these modern girls not lost much of the tender, waiting, indefiniteness
of youth? I have seen so many among them who, to me at least, appear at
odds with the world, and their passionate, unbalanced and over-excited
natures. Their faces at sixteen, fifteen, and even at fourteen years,
already are old, with hard confidence showing in the bold gaze, but no
happiness. How many bear an expression of almost tired disappointment, a
disappointment, not of the senses, but of the soul. And this expression
is so common. To my eyes, girls far more and far oftener look alike now
than formerly they did. So often they seem