Indeed, a man's sluggish current may not be called love, compared with
the rushing fountain that wells up when a boy's heart is struck with
the heavenly rod. If you would taste love, drink of the pure stream
that youth pours out at your feet. Do not wait till it has become a
muddy river before you stoop to catch its waves.

Or is it that you like its bitter flavor--that the clear, limpid water
is insipid to your palate and that the pollution of its after-course
gives it a relish to your lips? Must we believe those who tell us
that a hand foul with the filth of a shameful life is the only one a
young girl cares to be caressed by?

That is the teaching that is bawled out day by day from between those
yellow covers. Do they ever pause to think, I wonder, those devil's
ladyhelps, what mischief they are doing crawling about God's garden,
and telling childish Eves and silly Adams that sin is sweet and that
decency is ridiculous and vulgar? How many an innocent girl do they
not degrade into an evil-minded woman? To how many a weak lad do they
not point out the dirty by-path as the shortest cut to a maiden's
heart? It is not as if they wrote of life as it really is. Speak
truth, and right will take care of itself. But their pictures are
coarse daubs painted from the sickly fancies of their own diseased
imagination.

We want to think of women not--as their own sex would show them--as
Lorleis luring us to destruction, but as good angels beckoning us
upward. They have more power for good or evil than they dream of. It
is just at the very age when a man's character is forming that he
tumbles into love, and then the lass he loves has the making or
marring of him. Unconsciously he molds himself to what she would have