“You are certainly much safer to keep in confidence with your mother,” said Mr. Wayne, “and I should say that a young man who didn’t want you to show his letters to your mother is one you wouldn’t want to correspond with. I should be afraid that he’d be one who would show your letters to his boy friends and perhaps make fun of them.”
“O, father! Do you think that? It seems to me that wouldn’t be honorable.”
“Boys do not always have the highest ideals of honor, my dear. I remember once, when I was young, I was camping with a lot of young fellows. I think all of them were corresponding with girls, and these letters were common property. They were read aloud as we gathered around the camp fire in the evening; their bad spelling was laughed at and their silly sentimentalities 31 talked of in ways that I am sure would have made the girls’ cheeks burn with shame. They thought, of course, that the boy they wrote to would keep their letters as sweet secrets. I learned a good deal that summer about girls whom I had never seen. Some of them I came to know afterwards, and I often wondered what they would say if I should quote from their letters some foolish sentimentality which they imagined no one knew about except the one to whom it was written.”
“Then, father, you’d say we ought never to correspond with boys?”
“No, I didn’t quite say that. I can see that a friendly correspondence might be helpful. It seems to me that girls and boys can be a great help and inspiration to each other. I once had a girl correspondent who wrote most charming letters, simple recitals of her daily life with some of her little moralizings thrown in. Perhaps I would smile at them now, but they surely helped me to have higher ideals and made me have a great reverence for womanhood. There was one thing about her letters that I thought strange then, but I now think it very wise. She always signed every letter with her full name, never with her home pet name. I have often thought of it, and I believe it is a good plan. Certainly, if you knew that you would sign your full name to every letter, you would not be as apt to write foolishly as if your identity would be hidden under some 32 nickname. And you never know what will become of your letters. A few days ago I read in the newspaper some foolish letters written by a girl to a man. She never imagined that any one else would read them. Yet here they were, in print, and the whole country was commenting on them. They were all signed by some soubriquet such as ‘Your darlingest Babe,’ or ‘Little Jimmy,’ and under the shield of such a signature she no doubt felt safe. But a dark tragedy tore away the flimsy protection and every one saw all her foolishness and sin.”
Helen shuddered. “I believe I’ll make it a rule,” she said, soberly, “to write only such things in my letters that I’d be willing to have printed over my own name.”
“That’s a good resolution, and I hope you’ll keep it. You can feel quite certain that if you don’t want to sign your own name to your letter you’d better not write it.
“There are a number of suggestions I would like to make to you along the line of your association with young men,” said Mr. Wayne, after a pause. “You have had no experience as yet, but in a few years you will be a woman and maybe then you’ll have no father or mother to give you counsel. As you know, I don’t want to shut you away from the society of young men, but I want you to know how to make it of the greatest advantage to you and to them.
“Do you know, dear, that women and girls 33 always make the moral standards which maintain in the society of which they form a part?”
Helen shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t see how that can be,” she said, “for everybody says that women are better than men; and I am sure boys do lots of things that we girls would never think of doing.”