PERNICIOUS PEACHES
The Pernicious Peaches whereof we speak are never out of season. They may be seen almost any month of the year on the covers of magazines, devoted to the moral and social uplift of young girls in general, and the American young girl in particular.
The February magazine peach crop is usually most abundant—All through the merry month of Saint Valentine they hang on the news-stands, singly or in clusters, and Peaches they are to be sure—Peaches in the stupidest, cheapest, slangiest nonsense of the word.
There they hang to quote the redundant Dr. Roget, F. R. S.—“simpering, smirking, sniggling, giggling, ogling, tittering, prinking, preening, flaunting, flirting, mincing, coquetting, frivoling, attitudinizing, self-conscious artificial, smug, namby-pamby, sentimental, unnatural, stagy, shallow, weak, wanting, soft, sappy, spoony, fatuous, idiotic, imbecile, driveling, blatant, babbling, vacant, foolish, silly, senseless, addle-pated, giddy, childish, chuckle-headed, puerile,” and, what is above all else inexcusable in a peach—mushy.
And these (in journals that set the fashions moral, mental, social and sartorial) for our young American sister at the most impressionable age of her life—the age when, whatever may be her dormant possibilities, she is by her nature irresistibly impelled to pattern herself after the favorite girl of her class in school, or the favorite actress on the stage—to copy her coiffure, her dress, her deportment, even the expression of her face.
And how, you ask, can a young girl be harmed by imitating what, however vacuous or silly, is after all only an expression?
The answer is, that just as a persistent bend of thought modifies and in time fixes the expression of the face, so a habitual expression (or lack of expression) of face influences the bend of thought and, in time, fixes the character.
If you don’t believe this, dear girl, stand before your looking-glass and smirk at yourself as hard as you can, until you look (as much as it is possible for a human girl to look) like a magazine-cover Peach. Then try to hold the “Peach” look while you recite: