And their conscience is more tender. But there is one temptation to
which they too often yield. With them the great dangers are vanity
and the thirst for admiration, which often become a sort of diseased
excitement--what drinking or gambling is to men. Here is the weak
point. Yielding chiefly to this temptation, scores of women are falling
every day. Vanity leads them to wear the extravagant, the flashy,
the immodest, the unhealthy dress, to dance the immodest dance, to
adopt the alluring manner, to carry flirting to extremes. Vanity leads
them, in short, to forget true self-respect, to enjoy the very doubtful
compliment of a miserably cheap admiration. They become impatient
of the least appearance of neglect or indifference, they become
eager in pursuit of attention, while men always attribute that pursuit
to motives of the coarsest kind. It is generally vanity alone which
leads a married woman to receive the first disgraceful flattery of
dissolute men. Probably nine out of ten of those American women
who have trifled with honor and reputation, whose names are spoken
with the sneer of contempt, have been led on, step by step, in the
path of sin by vanity as the chief motive. Where one woman falls
from low and coarse passions, a hundred fall from sheer levity and
the love of admiration.

To counteract this fatal influence young women must be taught to
respect themselves, to be on their guard against vanity and its
enticements, to cherish personal modesty in every way. The married
woman who is quietly working by example or by precept among the
young girls nearest to her, seeking to cherish and foster among them
this vital principle of pure personal modesty in dress, in language, in
reading, in tone of voice, in countenance, in manner--the natural
outward expression of true modesty of heart--is doing far more for
her country than if she were to mount the rostrum to-morrow and