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.

Boys are sometimes told that they must swim with the stream at school and
join in bad talk because "everybody does it," but the nice boy stands out
and does not, and helps weaker ones thereby.

Girls have a much smaller temptation in that way--more to silliness than
to actual wrong; but your tone--in these matters that I speak of--helps
your brothers in their battles with downright wrong. Every boy who knows
his sister's standard is very high, is helped far more than he is
conscious of, by her influence,--and far more than she ever knows, for she
does not know all his temptations.

Women have been trained to nice-mindedness by centuries of public