The female line, where it differs from the male, is the dotted line, the
greater or less probability or value of life being shown by the greater
or less distance of the line of life from the level line at the bottom.
Infant life being very fragile, the line steadily rises till it reaches
its highest point, between thirteen and fourteen. In both cases there
is then a rapid fall, the age of puberty being a critical age. But from
fifteen, when the female line begins to right itself, only showing by a
gentle curve downwards the added risks of the child-bearing period in a
woman's life, the male line, which ought, without these risks, to keep
above the female line, makes a sharp dip below it, till it reaches its
lowest point at twenty-five, the age when the excesses of youth have had
time to tell most on the system.[1] Here, at least, is evidence that
none can gainsay. The more you ponder that mysterious sharp dip in the
man's line of life at the very age which Nature intended should be the
prime and flower of life, the more deeply you will feel that some deep
and hidden danger lies concealed there, the more earnestly you will come
to the conclusion that you cannot and will not thrust from you the
responsibility that rests upon you as the boy's mother of helping to
guard him from it. Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the
temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot. The few first
days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets
of our large towns. As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage,
much animadverted on at the time:

"And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian
families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally
learnt at a great public school. Why! if you could hear those boys
of fourteen who blush before their mothers, and sneak off in
silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each
other, it would be the woman's turn to blush then. Before Pen was