miserable beyond
words, removing the buttons and doing his best in the dark to bore
buttonholes which would admit what every other boy in the school
had--a collar stud.

With girls perhaps this question of fitness for school life does not
arise in so urgent a way. Girls are usually older when they go to
school, and girls' schools are perhaps less terrifying and more like
home. There is, however, one important point which should be borne in
mind. The date of the onset of puberty varies much in both sexes. If
the boy grows to a great hulking fellow at fourteen, and even displays
a desire secretly to borrow his father's razor, he is at no particular
disadvantage as compared with his fellows. He is so much bigger and
stronger than the others that he may thereby early enjoy the
distinction of playing at "big side," or of getting a place in the
school Eleven. He is probably much envied by those of the same age
who, with the aid of their youthful aspect, can still occasionally
extract compensation by inducing the railway company to let them
travel to school at half fare. But with girls it is different. Many at
fourteen or fifteen are children still; some are grown up, with the
tastes, feelings, and attraction of maturity. Those who have developed
fastest are often, for that very reason, kept backward in school
learning. Often they are nervously the least stable. Now that large
schools for girls on the model of our public schools are become the
fashion, such precociously developed and nervously unstable girls are
apt to find themselves in the very uncongenial society of little girls
of twelve or thirteen. The elder girls commonly hold aloof, while
mistresses are apt to view this precocious development with
disapproval, and to attempt to retard what cannot be retarded by
insisting that the young woman has remained a child. I remember being
called in consultation by a surgeon who had been asked to operate for
appendicitis upon a girl of fourteen. I found a tall, well-grown girl,
with an appearance and manner that made her look four years older. I
could find no signs of appendicitis, but I learned from her that she
had been for three months at a large girls' school, and that in a few
days' time her second term was due to begin. As we became friends, she
agreed that her appendicitis and her resolve not to return to school,
where she was unhappy, were but different ways of saying the same
thing. She was an only child who had trave