Now, when a girl is not much accustomed to society (especially to men’s society), it sometimes turns her head, and she gets an idea that any joke about a man is amusing.  I will not say that this sort of a joke is like a servant, for a well-brought-up servant puts many a young lady to shame by her nice-mindedness.  Young ladies’ academies are supposed to be full of that sort of thing—­for which there is no word but vulgar—­and when such girls leave such academies to go home for good, they are always in holes and corners either with a man, or with another girl talking about one.  A man does not respect that kind of girl—­though he will go just as far with her as she will let him—­and he will tell it again at his club, and probably to his sisters.  If she does not mind about her dignity, why should he?  There is hardly a man living who would not make game of the advances of the girl who admires him, just as there is hardly a man living who would speak to others of the girl he loves.  Unluckily, every idiotic girl (who is silly about him) thinks she is the one he cares for, and never realizes how she is “giving herself away!”

And the worst of it is, that the girl is not only lowering herself, she is lowering a man’s standard of Woman in general.  You, each one of you, help to decide whether your brothers and every man you meet shall have a high or a low standard about women.  I assure you, when I think of girls I have known of (and heard of from men), I wonder that men have any respect for women at all.

We shall never know how much of Dante’s nobleness was due to his having once known a girl in Florence, who never was in any specially close relationship to him.  He met her at the gatherings of Florentine ladies, where she must have heard his songs, but the most close personal intercourse they had was one day when they passed each other in the street, and she bowed to him,—­“From that salute, humbleness flowed all his being o’er.”  Do you say, he was a poet, and Beatrice was one of the most famous of all Fair Women, and therefore they are no guide for you?  What man has not got poetry in him, waiting for the woman he loves to wake it? and what woman does not possess that womanhood which is, by God’s ordering, in itself an attraction to a man, and which it rests with her so to use—­by self-restraint and love of noble things—­that she may be, to every man about her, something of what Beatrice was to Dante?—­he may know very little of her, and care less, but she 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.