[GIRLS AS I HAVE KNOWN THEM.]
By ELSA D'ESTERRE KEELING, Author of "Old Maids and Young."
PART I.
THE SENTIMENTAL GIRL.
This is the girl who has "dear five hundred friends," to borrow a phrase from Cowper, and whose friendship divided among so many yields so small a part to each that Coleridge will not call it friendship, but calls it "a feminine friendism."
This is the girl who kisses other girls with an indiscriminateness which made a man say lately, "It makes men envious." To which—alack and alas!—the answer made was, "It's meant to do that!"
This is the girl who uses words of the kind that Oliver Wendell Holmes called "highly oxygenated," but which are, if the plain truth be said of them, the weak expression of weak feeling.
This is the girl who, even when she is least impious, may forget that only the Divinity should be adored; who is never without what a witty woman writer has called "a gentle sorrow"; whose favourite words are "so" and "oh"; and who writes at an early age a novel the heroine of which—I quote from a manuscript beside me—has "hair of the colour of Aventurine glass, of a lovely brownish-red tint with golden flashes in it," which hair turns white with fright in a single night.
Golden Flashes