persist. Children can give no better reason why they stop playing with
dolls than because other things are liked better, or they are too old,
ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for
marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to Venus.
Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a
four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido,
after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife
by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly
realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or
feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in
secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single
women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those
who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student
concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent
years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played
with them in the most realistic manner, kept them because actually
most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and
less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But the instinct
that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle
points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls
are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always
children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and
reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but
where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the
height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of
future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is
probably false. Nor are doll and child comparable to first and second
dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as
children with too great abandonment are those who make the best
mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of