A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ''nymphets.''
Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.
Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it.
Girls like to be played with, and rumpled a little too, sometimes.
It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.
The knowingness of little girls hidden underneath their curls.
The restlessness that comes upon girls upon summer evenings results in lasting trouble unless it is speedily controlled. The right kind of man does not look for a wife on the streets, and the right kind of girl waits till the man comes to her home for her.
There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.
We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ''dark continent'' for psychology.
We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.
What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.
You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.