twenty!

Strange to reflect that young people of both sexes can meet in
ball-rooms without exciting their parents' suspicions, and that they
cannot do so in class-rooms!

When I was a boy at school in France, I can well remember how we boys
felt on the subject. If we heard that a young girl, say the sister of
some school-fellow, was with her mother in the common parlor to see her
brother, why, it created a commotion, a perfect revolution in the whole
establishment. It was no use trying to keep us in order. We would climb
on the top of the seats or of the tables to endeavor to see something of
her, even if it were but the top of her hat, or a bit of her gown across
the recreation yard at the very end of the building. It was an event.
Many of us would even immediately get inspired and compose verses
addressed to the unknown fair visitor. In these poetical effusions we
would imagine the young girl carried off by some miscreant, and we would
fly to her rescue, save her, and throw ourselves at her feet to receive
her hand as our reward. Yes, we would get quite romantic or, in plain
English, quite silly. We could not imagine that a woman was a reasoning
being with whom you can talk on the topics of the day, or have an
ordinary conversation on any ordinary subject. To us a woman was a being
with whom you can only talk of love, or fall in love, or, maybe, for
whom you may die of love.

This manner of training young men goes a long way toward explaining the
position of woman in France as well as her ways. It explains why a
Frenchman and a Frenchwoman, when they converse together, seldom can
forget that one is a man and the other a woman. It does not prove that a
Frenchwoman must necessarily be, and is, affected in her relations with
men; but it explains why she does not feel, as the American woman does,
that a man and woman can enjoy a _tete-a-tete_ free from all those
commonplace flatteries, compliments, and platitudes that
badly-understood gallantry suggests. Many American ladies have made me
forget, by the easiness of their manner and the charm and naturalness of
their conversation, that I was speaking with women, and with lovely
ones, too. This I could never have forgotten in the company of French
ladies.

On account of this feeling, and perhaps also of the difference which
exists between the education received by a man and that received by a
woman in France, the conversation will always be on some light topics,
litera