No wonder that your son comes into the room with a confused expression of uncomfortable pain on every feature, when he does not in the least know whether he will be recognized as a gentleman, or overlooked as a little boy.  No wonder he sits down in his chair with movements suggestive of nothing but rheumatism and jack-knives, when he is thinking that perhaps there may be some reason why he should not take that particular chair, and that, if there is, he will be ordered up.

No wonder that your tall daughter turns red, stammers, and says foolish things on being courteously spoken to by strangers at dinner, when she is afraid that she may be sharply contradicted or interrupted, and remembers that day before yesterday she was told that children should be seen and not heard.

I knew a very clever girl, who had the misfortune to look at fourteen as if she were twenty.  At home, she was the shyest and most awkward of creatures; away from her mother and sisters, she was self-possessed and charming.  She said to me, once, “Oh!  I have such a splendid time away from home.  I’m so tall, everybody thinks I am grown up, and everybody is civil to me.”

I know, also, a man of superb physique, charming temperament, and uncommon talent, who is to this day—­and he is twenty-five years old—­nervous and ill at ease in talking with strangers, in the presence of his own family.  He hesitates, stammers, and never does justice to his thoughts.  He says that he believes he shall never be free from this distress; he cannot escape from the recollections of the years between fourteen and twenty, during which he was so systematically snubbed that his mother’s parlor was to him worse than the chambers of the Inquisition.  He knows that he is now sure of courteous treatment; that his friends are all proud of him; but the old cloud will never entirely disappear.  Something has been lost which can never be regained.  And the loss is not his alone, it is theirs too; they are all poorer for life, by reason of the unkind days which are gone.

This, then, is the explanation of the awkward age.  I am not afraid of any dissent from my definition of the source whence its misery springs.  Everybody’s consciousness bears witness.  Everybody knows, in the bottom of his heart, that, however much may be said about the change of voice, the thinness of cheeks, the sharpness of arms, the sudden length in legs and lack of length in trousers and frocks,—­all these had nothing to do with the real misery.  The real misery was simply and solely the horrible feeling of not belonging anywhere; not knowing what a moment might bring forth in the way of treatment from others; never being sure which impulse it would be safer to follow, to retreat or to advance, to speak or to be silent, and often overwhelmed with unspeakable mortification at the rebuff of the one or the censure of the other.  Oh! how dreadful it all was!  How dreadful it all is, even to remember!  It would be malicious even to refer to it, except to point out the cure.